We continued drifting
gradually north, afloat on ice-floes, past Graham Land and Joinville
Island, and finally took to the boats on April 9, 1916, and reached
Elephant Island on April 15. The Falkland Island Dependencies were
thus practically circumnavigated, and it may be interesting to compare
the records of whales seen in the region outside and to the south of
this area with the records and the percentage of each species captured
in the intensive fishing area.
The most productive part of the South Atlantic lies south of latitude
50° S., where active operations extend to and even beyond the Antarctic
circle. It appears to be the general rule in Antarctic waters that
whales are more numerous the closer the association with ice
conditions, and there seems to be reasonable grounds for supposing that
this may explain the comparatively few whales sighted by Expeditions
which have explored the more northerly and more open seas, while the
whalers themselves have even asserted that their poor seasons have
nearly always coincided with the absence of ice, or with poor ice
conditions. At all events, those Expeditions which have penetrated far
south and well into the pack-ice have, without exception, reported the
presence of whales in large numbers, even in the farthest south
latitudes, so that our knowledge of the occurrence of whales in the
Antarctic has been largely derived from these Expeditions, whose main
object was either the discovery of new land or the Pole itself.
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