refore never been prosecuted to any great
extent on Novaya Zemlya; and fragments of skeletons of the whale
which are found thrown up in such quantities on the shores of
Spitzbergen, are not to be found, so far as my experience reaches,
either on the shores of Novaya Zemlya, on the coast of the Kara Sea,
or at the places on the north coast of Siberia between the Yenisej
and the Lena, at which we landed. The sacrifices which were so long
made in vain in the endeavour to find a passage to China in this
direction accordingly were not compensated, as on Spitzbergen, by
the rise of a profitable whale fishery. Meeting with a whale is
spoken of by the first seafarers in these regions as something very
remarkable and dangerous; for instance, in the account of Stephen
Burrough's voyage in 1556:--"On St. James his day, there was a
monstrous whale aboord of us, so neere to our side that we might
have thrust a sworde or any other weapon in him, which we durst not
doe for feare lie should have over-throwen our shippe; and then I
called my company together, and all of us shouted, and with the crie
that we made he departed from us; there was as much above water of
his back as the bredth of our pinnesse, and at his falling down he
made such a terrible noise in the water, that a man would greatly
have marvelled, except he had known the cause of it; but, God be
thanked, we were quietly delivered of him."[86] When Nearchus sailed
with the fleet of Alexander the Great from the Indus to the Red Sea,
a whale also caused so great a panic that it was only with
difficulty that the commander could restore order among the
frightened seamen, and get the rowers to row to the place where the
whale spouted water and caused a commotion in the sea like that of a
whirlwind. All the men now shouted, struck the water with their
oars, and sounded their trumpets, so that the large, and, in the
judgment of the Macedonian heroes, terrible animal, was frightened.
It seems to me that from these incidents we may draw the conclusion
that great whales in Alexander's time were exceedingly rare in the
sea which surrounds Greece, and in Burrough's time in that which
washes the shores of England. Quite otherwise was the whale regarded
on Spitzbergen some few years after Burrough's voyage by the Dutch
and English whalers. At the sight of a whale all men were out of
themselves with joy, and rushed down into the boats in order from
them to attack and kill the valuable ani