Abstract
MR. THEODORE E. SALVESEN makes a very interesting report1 on the whale fisheries of the Falkiand Islands and dependencies. Whaling in southern seas began, he tells us, with the eighteenth century, the first British fleet of twelve vessels sailing in 1725. They went after sperm, whales or cachalots (Physeter macrocephalus) and southern right whales (Balaena, australis) which were harpooned from rowing boats. In the first half of the nineteenth century there were as many as 500–600 whalers so employed—wooden sailing ships, complete in themselves, the blubber being rendered into oil an board. But this kind of vessel is now practically unknown, its place having been taken by the modern steam whaler; and the venue has changed, in the far south at any rate, from sperm whale and right whale to the finners. The sperm whale is seldom met with in the waters round the Falkland Islands and dependencies, its normal habitat being in warmer zones, and the southern right whale is no longer specially sought after, since the price of baleen has fallen so low. Thus attention has been directed to the blue whale (Balaenoptera sibbaldii), the largest living animal in the world, to the finner whale (B. musculus or physllus), to the small fish whale (B. bortlis), and to the humpback hale (Megaptera boops)—all of them Often called “finners.” As they are more active than the sperm whale and the right whale and only awash for a very short tim when breathing, and as they sink after being killed, they were left entirely unmolested in the old day But now their turn has come.
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References
Scientific Results Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, iv. (1914) pp. 475 486. 10 plates and map.
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Whaling in Southern Seas . Nature 94, 678–679 (1915). https://doi.org/10.1038/094678a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/094678a0