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Updated: July 9, 2025
This preliminary is the more needed for the reason alluded to in the Preface the want of knowledge of the subject that is apparent everywhere. The Greenland whale fishery has been so popularized that most people know something about it; the sperm whale fishery still awaits its Scoresby and a like train of imitators and borrowers.
But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest of the whales.
Snow, which, in its crystallization, surpasses the most perfect gems, is invariably found arranged in determinate angles, to wit, 60°, and its double, 120°, and formed of six-sided prisms. More than one hundred kinds have been described by Dr. Scoresby and others, and all these are combinations of the six-sided prism.
Captain Scoresby, a most intelligent and active captain in the whale fishery trade, has very lately succeeded in reaching the eastern coasts of Greenland, and is disposed to think that the descendants of the Danish colonists, of whose existence nothing is known since this coast was blocked, up by ice at the beginning of the fifteenth century, still inhabit it.
It is stated by Scoresby, that with a portion of this ice, of by no means regular convexity, used as a burning lens, he has frequently burnt wood, fired gunpowder, melted lead, and lit the sailors' pipes, to their no small astonishment, the ice itself remaining in the mean while perfectly fixed and pellucid.
This difference will be explained shortly in a quotation from Dr Kane's work; meanwhile, in support of the present theory, let us listen to the words of one who saw with his own eyes something similar to what has been described. Dr Scoresby, than whom a better man never explored the arctic seas, says:
Neither the masters, the mates, nor those men who had been all their lives in the Greenland service, had ever experienced such imminent peril; and they declared, that a common whaler must have been crushed to atoms." Captain Scoresby relates a similar narrow escape from destruction owing to the same cause.
"England honors Scoresby to this day. And Scoresby was successful after two voyages that ruined his owners. As to them mermaids frightening away the whales, it's all a superstition.
Scoresby relates that in the course of a single summer thirty whales perished in the same way in Baffin's Sea; he saw a three-master flattened in a minute between two immense walls of ice. Other vessels were split through, as if with a lance, by pointed icicles a hundred feet long, meeting through the planks.
But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest of the whales.
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