mal. The fishery was carried
on with such success, that, as has already been stated, the right
whale (_Balaena mysticetus_ L.), whose pursuit then gave full
employment to ships by hundreds, and to men by tens of thousands, is
now practically extirpated. Thus during our many voyages in these
waters we have only seen one such whale, which happened on the 23rd
June, 1864, among the drift-ice off the west coast of Spitzbergen in
78 deg. N.L. As the right whale still occurs in no limited numbers
in other parts of the Polar Sea, and as there has been no whale
fishing on the coast of Spitzbergen for the last forty or fifty
years, this state of things shows how difficult it is to get an
animal type to return to a region where it has once been extirpated,
or from which it has been driven away.

The whale which Captain Svend Foeyn has almost exclusively hunted on
the coast of Finmark since 1864 belongs to quite another species,
_blaohvalen_ (_Balaenoptera Sibbaldii_ Gray); and there are likewise
other species of the whale which still in pretty large numbers
follow shoals of fish to the Norwegian coast, where they sometimes
strand and are killed in considerable numbers. A _tandhval_, killer
or sword-fish (_Orca gladiator_ Desm.) was even captured some years
ago in the harbour of Tromsoe. This whale was already dying of
suffocation, caused by an attempt to swallow an eider which entered
the gullet, not, as the proper way is, with the head, but with the
tail foremost. When the mouthful should have slidden down, it was
prevented by the stiff feathers sticking out, and the bird stuck in
the whale's throat, which, to judge by the extraordinary struggles
it immediately began to make, must have caused it great
inconvenience, which was increased still more when the inhabitants
did not neglect to take advantage of its helpless condition to
harpoon it.

[Footnote 60: The name _stormfogel_ is also used for the Stormy
Petrel (_Thalassidroma pelagica_, Vig.). This bird does not occur in
the portions of the Polar Sea with which we are now concerned. ]

[Footnote 61: At Bear Island, Tobiesen, on the 28th May, 1866, saw
fulmars' eggs laid immediately on the ice which still covered the
rock. At one place a bird sitting on its eggs was even frozen fast
by one leg to the ice on the 31/21 August, 1596. Barents found on
the north part of Novaya Zemlya that some fulmars had chosen as a
hatching-place a piece of ice covered with a little earth. In