surface for the first time with its little angular dorsal fin, at once dispelling any doubts we might have had."[1]
It is supposed to be the largest mammal that has ever existed.[2] As it comes up to blow, "one sees first a small dark hump appear and then immediately a jet of grey fog squirted upwards fifteen to eighteen feet, gradually spreading as it rises vertically into the frosty air. I have been nearly in these blows once or twice and had the moisture in my face with a sickening smell of shrimpy oil. Then the hump elongates and up rolls an immense blue-grey or blackish-grey round back with a faint ridge along the top, on which presently appears a small hook-like dorsal fin, and then the whole sinks and disappears."[3]
To the biologist the pack is of absorbing interest. If you want to see life, naked and unashamed, study the struggles of this ice-world, from the diatom in the ice-floe to the big killer whale; each stage essential to the life of the stage above, and living on the stage below:
THE PROTOPLASMIC CYCLE
Big floes have little floes all around about 'em,
And all the yellow diatoms[4] couldn't do without 'em.
Forty million shrimplets feed upon the latter,
And they make the penguin and the seals and whales
Much fatter.
Along comes the Orca[5] and kills these down below,
While up above the Afterguard[6] attack them on the floe:
And if a sailor tumbles in and stoves the mushy pack in,
He's crumpled up between the floes, and so they get
Their whack in.
Then there's no doubt he soon becomes a Patent Fertilizer,
Invigorating diatoms, although they're none the wiser,
So the protoplasm passes on its never-ceasing round,
Like a huge recurring decimal . . . to which no
End is found.[7]
We were early on the scene compared with previous expeditions, but I do not suppose this alone can explain the
