Nordcaper

English

Mural showing a whaler and Nordcaper

Alternative forms

• nordcaper, north-caper

Etymology

Borrowing from Dutch, a reference to the North Cape in Finnmark, Norway, where most of these whales were found by Dutch and Norwegian whalers.

Noun

Nordcaper (plural Nordcapers)

1. A type of baleen whale from the North Atlantic (Balaena mysticetus or Balaena biscayensis).
   • 1880, William Henry Davenport Adams, Recent Polar Voyages:

     Besides the “Nordcapers,” the voyagers one day fell in with another species of dolphin, three or four of which gambolled under the Germania's bows.

   • 1926, Fishery Board for Scotland, Fishery Board for Scotland Scientific Investigations, page 8:

     Taking all our 69 Nordcapers together, the average girth, according to the measurements given, is just about 63 per cent. of the length of the fish ; that is to say, a whale of average size, say 474 feet long, would have a girth of 30 feet.

   • 1935, Ragnar Spärck, Søren Ludvig Tuxen, The Zoology of the Faroes: Vermes, Tardigrada:

     It may be mentioned that thus it was evidently not merely by chance that a Nordcaper was caught near the Faroes the same year.

   • 1998, Dale R. Calder, Willem Vervoort, Some Hydroids (Cnidaria: Hydrozoa) from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, in the North Atlantic Ocean, page 356:

     he repeated that he received the material from a whaler who had collected it from a ”Nordcaper” between Iceland and Newfoundland.