Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/369

Rh and D'Urville Island; and here tidal waters from Cook Strait swirl and eddy as if the ocean were pouring through a fissure into the earth. But it is not this for which the pass is most noted. It owes its celebrity mainly to Pelorus Jack, the "pilot fish." Generations ago Jack disported about the bows of Maori canoes en route from Pelorus Sound to the pass. To-day, as he has been for twenty years, he is the gamboling pilot-companion of steamers en route to and from the pass on the east. Through the pass he does not venture. On these steamers every passenger looks for Risso's dolphin (Grampus griseus), and when he does not appear there is keen disappointment aboard. In New Zealand "Pelorus Jack" are magic words. Everybody who knows Jack's history is interested in him; everybody likes to read about him. He is often in the public eye, and the public press has given him many a line. Several times he has been reported dead, but obituary notices notwithstanding, he still lives, and he has lived, says one old Maori chief, for fully two hundred and seventy-five years. Sometimes the dolphin takes a vacation for two or three weeks, and it is then his human friends wonder if the ocean of oblivion has claimed him. Since 1904 Jack and all other animals of his kind in Cook Strait—and he appears to be the only cetacean of his species there—have been protected by an Order in Council. But Death the indiscriminator will not grant him a protective order, and so, some day, on a Marlborough beach,