Page:Polar Exploration - Bruce - 1911.djvu/133

Rh dare not follow, so there is yet a chance that they will not be altogether exterminated. The purely commercial aspect of these whaling expeditions has, so far, made it impossible to make any detailed scientific cetacean investigation. A most profitable scientific investigation would be a cetacean expedition, which devoted its whole time with two or three ships to the study of these Antarctic whales, and, indeed, to the study of whales all the world over. It is not possible for an Antarctic exploring ship, with so many other duties to perform, to carry out this very important work.

In Arctic seas the most notable whale is the Greenland or Bowhead whale (Balæna mysticetus) which has been captured in enormous numbers in the past. In the seventeenth century there was a Dutch settlement called Smeerenburg, in the north-west of Spitsbergen, where the oil was boiled down and the whale-bone collected. As many as 2,000 people lived and worked there during the summer months, women as well as men, as any one visiting Spitsbergen at the present day can determine by reading both men's and women's names on the old Dutch wooden crosses, that have stood there in some cases for three hundred years, and many of which are still in a good state of preservation. Coffin after coffin is seen projecting half above the ground; human skulls and bones lie in and around them.