beast and a flesh-eater, and is more properly a dolphin.  But it seems that there are at least five or six other kinds of whales, some of which do not penetrate south of the pack, while others cruise in large numbers right up to the edge of the fast ice.  They feed upon the minute surface life of these seas, and large numbers of them were seen not only by the Terra Nova on her various cruises, but also by the shore parties in the waters of McMurdo Sound.  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 enormous beast appeared above the surface for the first time with its little angular dorsal fin, at once dispelling any doubts we might have had."[70]