nd. In both Wilson and Lillie we had skilled whale
observers, and their work has gone far to elucidate the still obscure
questions of whale distribution in the South.

The pack-ice offers excellent opportunities for the identification of
whales, because their movements are more restricted than in the open
ocean. In order to identify, the observer generally has only the blow,
and then the shape of the back and fin as the whale goes down, to guide
him. In the pack he sometimes gets more, as in the case of Balaenoptera
acutorostrata (Piked whale) on March 3, 1911. The ship "was ploughing her
way through thick pack-ice, in which the water was freezing between the
floes, so that the only open spaces for miles around were those made by
the slow movement of the ship. We saw several of these whales during the
day, making use of the holes in the ice near the ship for the purpose of
blowing. There was scarcely room between the floes for the whales to come
up to blow in their usual manner, which consists in rising almost
horizontally, and breaking the surface of the water with their backs. On
this occasion they pushed their snouts obliquely out of the water, nearly
as far as the eye, and after blowing, withdrew them below the water
again. Commander Pennell noted that several times one rested its head on
a floe not twenty feet from the ship, with its nostrils just on the
water-line; raising itself a few inches, it would blow and then subside
again for a few minutes to its original position with its snout resting
on the floe. They took no notice of pieces of coal which were thrown at
them by the men on board the ship."[69]

But no whale which we saw in the pack, and we often saw it elsewhere
also, was so imposing as the great Blue whale, some of which were
possibly more than 100 feet long. "We used to watch this huge whale come
to the surface again and again to blow, at intervals of thirty to forty
seconds, and from the fact that at each of four or five appearances no
vestige of a dorsal fin was visible, we began to wonder whether we had
not found the Right whale that was once reported to be so abundant in
Ross Sea. Again and again the spout went up into the cold air, a white
twelve-foot column of condensed moisture, followed by a smooth broad
back, and yet no fin. For some time we remained uncertain as to its
identity, till at last in sounding for a longer disappearance and a
greater depth than usual, the hinder third of the enormo