A whale, for an old party, is not so slow.  Alarmed while extended motionless at the surface of the sea, he can sink in five or six seconds beyond the reach of human enemies.  His velocity along the surface horizontally, diving obliquely or perpendicularly, seems to be the same, a rate of from twelve to fourteen miles an hour.  Now, to carry a whale of seventy-four tons through the Arctic at the rate of twelve miles an hour would require a (sea) horse-power of one hundred and forty-five.  Captain Scoresby, a whale expert, by careful calculation estimates that a surface of two square miles of the Arctic Ocean contains 23,888,000,000,000,000 of the minute animalculae on which the Bowhead feeds, so we hope there is enough to go round.  He quaintly elucidates this inconceivable number by explaining that eighty thousand persons would have been employed since Adam in counting these little medusae in the two square miles.  Why any one should count them we fail to conceive and gladly accept Scoresby’s figures.

The poet tells of shooting an arrow into the air and “long years afterwards in an oak he found the arrow still unbroke.”  Those who stick harpoons into whales and suffer the animal to get away start floating rumours (a sort of cyclometer of the sea) for their grandsons to read in blubbery history three generations after.  England offered knighthood and a bag of sterling pounds to him who would discover a Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific.  M’Clure and the heirs of Sir John Franklin disputed the honour of this achievement.  In the “North Sea” lived a whale who exhibited in his own person indubitable proof of having found that elusive Anian Strait.  At Herald Island, due north of Bering Strait, in 1886, a whale was caught who carried round in his inside pocket of blubber the head of a harpoon marked Ansell Gibbs.  The Ansell Gibbs was wrecked at Marble Island south of Chesterfield Inlet on Hudson Bay on October 13, 1871.  Imagination sees opportunity in this for establishing hyperborean letter-service between lovers kept apart by cruel ice-floes.  Eskimo Evangeline wandering under Northern Lights seeking Dusky Gabriel might find here a carrier-pigeon of utility.  Is it not Pliny who gives us a delightful account of Hippo’s enamoured dolphin?

Captain Kelly was the first to notice that whales sing One Sunday, while officers from three ships were “gamming” over their afternoon walrus-meat, Kelly dropped his glass with, “I hear a Bowhead!” There was much chaffing about “Kelly’s band,” but Kelly weighed anchor and went to find the band-wagon.  Every sail followed his, and the result was the bagging of three whales.  Among Bowheads, this sing-song is a call made by the leader of a school as he forces passage through Bering Sea to give notice to those who follow that the straits are clear of ice.  Walruses and seals and all true mammals having lungs and living in the water have a bark that sounds weird enough coming up from