An aqueous vapour, consisting of very minute frozen particles, sometimes occupies the lower regions of the atmosphere in temperate and frigid climates, during frosty weather, and is deposited on the ground, on surfaces of ice, or almost any other substance with which it comes in contact. This vapour seems to be of the nature of hoar-frost; it generally appears in the evening, after a bright sunshiny day.
Fog, or mist, is the last meteor that remains to be considered. This is one of the greatest annoyances that the arctic whalers have to encounter. It frequently prevails during the greater part of the month of July, and sometimes, at considerable intervals, in June and August. Its density is often such, that it circumscribes the prospect to an area of a few acres, not being pervious to sight at the distance of a hundred yards. It frequently lies so low that the brightness of the sun is scarcely at all intercepted; in such cases, substances warmed by the sun’s rays, give to the air immediately above them increased capacity for moisture, by which evaporation goes briskly on during the densest fogs. In Newfoundland, on occasions when the sun’s rays penetrate the mist, and heat the surface of the rocks, fish is frequently dried during the thickest fogs. Fogs are more frequent and more dense at the borders of the ice than near the coast of Spitzbergen. They occur principally when the mercury, in the thermometer, is near the freezing point, but they are by no means uncommon with the temperature of 40° or 45°. They are most general with south-westerly, southerly, and south-easterly winds. They seldom occur with high winds, yet in one or two instances I have observed them very thick, even in storms. Rain generally disperses them. Fogs, by increasing the apparent distances of objects, appear sometimes to magnify men into giants, hummocks of ice into mountains, and common pieces of drift-ice into heavy floes or bergs. They are an especial annoyance to the whale-fisher, and greatly perplex the navigator, by preventing him from obtaining observations for the correction of his latitude and longitude, so that he often sails in complete uncertainty. Fogs are more common near the ice than in the vicinity of the land, more frequent in open seasons than in close seasons, and more intense and more common in the southern fishing-stations than in the most northern.
[CHAPTER V.]
A SKETCH OF THE ZOOLOGY OF THE ARCTIC REGIONS.
In the arrangement of the following original observations on, and descriptions of the more remarkable animals inhabiting, or frequenting, Spitzbergen and the adjacent seas, I have followed Linnæus, in combination with La Cepède. The latter author has published a most voluminous and pleasing account of cetaceous animals, and has made some judicious changes in the Linnæan arrangements. By La Cepède, for instance, whales having the dorsal fin are separated from those without it; the former being called, in distinction from the latter, Balænopteræ, signifying whales with a fin.
Our first description must relate to the animals of the cetaceous kind, which frequent the Greenland Seas.
Of these the first in eminence and of importance to our commerce, is the Balæna mysticetus, the common or Greenland whale. This animal is productive of more oil than any other of the cetacea, and being less active, slower in its motion, and more timid than any other of its kind, of similar, or nearly similar, magnitude, it is more easily captured. Its size has been much overrated, and, in his excellent natural history of cetaceous animals, La Cepède has been guilty of considerable exaggeration. In the age when whales were regarded with superstitious dread, it is easy to conceive that the dimensions of an animal inhabiting an element in which it cannot easily be measured, would be recorded with extravagance. Authors of the first respectability in the present day give a length of eighty to one hundred feet to the mysticetus, and remark with unqualified assertion, that when the captures were less frequent, and the animals had sufficient time to attain their full growth, specimens were found of one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet in length, or even longer; and some ancient naturalists, indeed, have gone so far as to assert, that whales had been seen of above nine hundred feet in length. In the present day, however, it is certain that they are by no means so bulky. Of three hundred and twenty-two individuals, in the capture of which I have been personally concerned, no one, I believe, exceeded sixty feet in length, and the largest I ever measured was fifty-eight feet, from one extremity to the other, being one of the largest to appearance which I ever saw. An uncommon whale that was caught near Spitzbergen, about twenty years ago, the whalebone of which measured almost fifteen feet, was not, I understand, so much as seventy feet in length; and the longest actual measurement that I have met with, or heard of, is given by sir Charles Giesecké, who informs us, that in the spring of 1813, a whale was killed at Godhaven of the length of sixty-seven feet. These, however, are very uncommon instances. I therefore conceive that sixty feet may be considered as the size of the larger animals of this species, and sixty-five feet in length as a magnitude which very rarely occurs.
I believe, too, that whales are now met with of as large dimensions as at any former period since the commencement of the whale-fishery; a point which, I think, can be established from various historical records.
The greatest circumference of the whale is from thirty to forty feet. It is thickest a little behind the fins, or in the middle, between the anterior and posterior extremes of the animal, from whence it gradually tapers in a conical form towards the tail, and slightly towards the head. Its form is cylindrical, from the neck to within ten feet of the tail, beyond which it becomes somewhat quadrangular, the greatest ridge being upward, or on the back, and running backward nearly across the middle of the tail. The head has somewhat of a triangular shape. The under-part, the arched outline of which is given by the jaw-bones, is flat, and measures sixteen to twenty feet in length, and ten to twelve in breadth. The lips, extending fifteen or twenty feet in length, and five or six in height, and forming the cavity of the mouth, are attached to the under-jaw, and rise from the jaw-bones at an angle of about 80°, having the appearance, when viewed in front, of the letter U. The upper-jaw, including the “crown-bone,” or skull, is bent down at the extremity, so as to shut the front and upper parts of the cavity of the mouth, and is overlapped by the lips in a squamous manner at the sides.
When the mouth is open, it presents a cavity as large as a room, and capable of containing a merchant-ship’s jolly-boat full of men, being six or eight feet wide, ten or twelve feet high in front, and fifteen or sixteen feet long. The fins, two in number, are placed between one-third and two-fifths of the length of the animal, from the snout, and about two feet behind the angle of the mouth. They are seven to nine feet in length, and four or five in breadth; and in the living animal are capable of considerable flexion. The whale has no dorsal fin.