He quaintly elucidates
this inconceivable number by explaining that eighty thousand persons
would have been employed since Adam in counting these little medusae in
the two square miles. Why any one should count them we fail to conceive
and gladly accept Scoresby's figures.
The poet tells of shooting an arrow into the air and "long years
afterwards in an oak he found the arrow still unbroke." Those who stick
harpoons into whales and suffer the animal to get away start floating
rumours (a sort of cyclometer of the sea) for their grandsons to read in
blubbery history three generations after. England offered knighthood and
a bag of sterling pounds to him who would discover a Northwest Passage
connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific. M'Clure and the heirs of Sir
John Franklin disputed the honour of this achievement. In the "North
Sea" lived a whale who exhibited in his own person indubitable proof of
having found that elusive Anian Strait. At Herald Island, due north of
Bering Strait, in 1886, a whale was caught who carried round in his
inside pocket of blubber the head of a harpoon marked _Ansell Gibbs_.
The _Ansell Gibbs_ was wrecked at Marble Island south of Chesterfield
Inlet on Hudson Bay on October 13, 1871.
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