THE TALE OF A WHALE
"In the North Sea lived a whale."
What is a whale? Well, although the whalers dub it so, it is not a fish,
but is a true mammal, the last of the mammoth creatures that trod the
earth and floundered the seas of a past age. The whale is the biggest,
the meekest, and the most interesting of living animals. As we go north,
we readjust all our ideas of distance and immensity. Rivers are longer,
lakes more majestic, and whales bigger than we have ever dreamed.
Examining a stranded whale at Herschel, we see the flippers to be really
hands with four fingers and a thumb enveloped in a sheath, and
rudimentary hind-legs are discovered under the tough skin. Without
doubt, the ancestors of the whale were land mammals which became adapted
to a littoral life, and in splashing round the shore acquired the habit
of swimming. Subsequently carried out to sea, they became under the new
environment the structure as we see it.
Off the delta of the Mackenzie, the Circumpolar of Arctic Bowhead whale
_(Balaena mysticetus_) is making his last stand. Unless a close season
is enforced, this cetacean carrying round his ten thousand dollar
mouthful of baleen will soon fold his fluked fins like the Arab and
swing that huge body of his into line with the Great Auk, the
Sea-Otter, the Plains Buffalo, and all the melancholy procession of
Canadian Has-Beens.
[Illustration: We Tell the Tale of a Whale]
Whales divide themselves into two great classes: those furnished with
teeth (the _Denticete_) and those in which the place of teeth is
supplied by a sieve process, furnishing the baleen or "whalebone" of
commerce (the _Mysticete_ or _Balaenidae_). The members of the Baleen
Whale family are the Sulphur-Bottoms, the Finner Whales or Rorquals, the
Humpbacks, and the king of all whales, the founder of the municipality
of Herschel Island, whom his pursuers call indiscriminately the "Arctic
Whale," "Polar Whale," "Greenland Whale," "Bowhead," "Right Whale," or
"Icebreaker."
Bowheads run in length from seventy to one hundred feet, weighing up to
one hundred and ten tons each, there being authentic records of
exceptional specimens whose weight reached two hundred and fifty tons.
Comparisons are illuminating. The mammoth or hairy elephant in the Field
Columbian Museum is nine feet six inches high and twelve feet in
longitudinal measurement. The lips of a Bowhead whale are from fifteen
to twenty feet in length and yield from one to two tons of pure oil
each,--lips that turn a nigger-minstrel green with envy! The eyes placed
in the posterior part of the head are each as big as an orange. The
tongue of the whale is twenty feet long, and this member, by means of
which he pushes to the top of his palate the animalculae on which he
feeds (as you would a gooseberry), gives the whaler six tons of oil. The
aorta is as big as a man's waist and, at each pulsation of the heart,
spurts out ten to fifteen gallons of blood. The heart itself is more
than a yard in transverse diameter. The toothed whales carry the teeth
in their lower jaw, the most valuable of this lot being the Spermaceti
or Sperm Whale or Cachalot, the Pilot Whale or Ca'ing Whale, the White
Whale or Beluga, the Killer or Orca, the Narwhal, and such small fry as
Blackfish, Porpoises, and Dolphins. Only the toothed whale eats fish;
the others live upon animalculae and the most minute of marine life,
called "brit" by the whalers. The Bowhead that we have come up to the
Arctic to see feeds on the smallest infusoria. He couldn't eat a herring
if by that one act he might attain immortality.
Whale errors die hard. Artists persistently depict the big animals as
spouting beautiful fountains of water, but the fact is that whales
breathe out air only from their lungs. They come to the surface for
that purpose, the "blowing" being quite analogous to the breathing of
land mammals. Noticing the condensation of a whale's breath up here in
the icy Arctic, we guess at the cause which gave rise to this particular
blunder. Milton in thirteen words manages to perpetrate three (whale)
bulls. "At his gills draws in, and at his trunk, spouts out, a sea."
Guiltless of either gills or trunk, no whale ever spouted out anything
but common or seaside air.
The Bowhead is hunted for his "whalebone"; the Cachalot or true Sperm,
the lord of the toothed whales, for that great lake of sperm oil and
spermaceti which he carries round in a portable tank in the top of his
head.
It is customary to call whales "fierce," "savage," "murderous," but this
is rank libel, for the whale is timid and affectionate. Every family,
however, has its black sheep. The Orca or Killer is the terror alike of
sealing-rookeries, fish-schools, and whale bone whales. One Killer taken
up here had in its stomach fourteen porpoises and fourteen large seals,
and it choked to death on the fifteenth. Banded in Molly Maguire groups,
the Killers murder the young seal-pups taking their first lessons in
swimming off the Pribilofs. We have seen them, a pack of hungry
sea-wolves, surround a Bowhead whale! A number of these brigands of the
Bering Sea hang on to the lower lip of the big whale till the opened
mouth allows a Killer to enter bodily, when the Bowhead's tongue is
eaten out and the whole sea is a shambles. At the approach of the Killer
even sea-lions seek the shore. And the Alaska Indian who would pose as
Bad Bill of the Clambank to the third generation carves a Killer as the
crest of his totem.
The American is more aggressive--shall we say progressive?--than the
Canadian. The Bowhead whale has within recent years chosen for his
summer habitat the pleasant waters off Arctic Canada. Each of these
floating tanks of baleen and oil nets his lucky captor from thirteen
thousand dollars upward?, and yet for twenty years Canadians have been
content to see their more enterprising cousins from California come into
their back-yard and carry off these oily prizes.
[Illustration: Two Little Ones at Herschel Island]
Is there much money in whales to-day? Are not oil and whalebone drugs in
the market? Let us see. Off the Mackenzie mouth is Herschel Island
anchorage. Here, since 1889, the American whaling-fleet, setting out
from San Francisco, has made its summer stand, its winter
waiting-quarters. One whale to one boat in a season covers the cost of
outfitting and maintenance, and more than one spells substantial profit.
In 1887, one of the Arctic whalers, the steamer _Orca_, captured
twenty-eight whales. The _Jeanette_ in 1905 got ten whales and a calf,
the _Karluk_ got seven whales, the _Alexander_ eight, the _Bowhead_
seven. The boats wintering at Herschel in that year had among them
thirty-three whales and one calf. At fifteen thousand dollars each (San
Francisco values for that season) the thirty-three whales netted very
nearly half a million. Two years later the _Narwhal_ took out fifteen
whales, the _Jeanette_ and _Bowhead_ each four. Although the average
bone per head is two thousand pounds, sometimes the catch runs far
beyond that figure. A whale caught by Capt. Simmons of the ship _John M.
Winthrop_ carried thirty-three hundred and fifty pounds of bone in its
head,--$16,750! One of these at a time would be good fishing.
The first Bowhead taken from these waters went in 1891 to the American
steam-whaler _Grampus_, her catch for three seasons being twenty-one
whales. Previous to this, even wise whale-men thought it useless to go
"to the east'ard of P'int Barrow" for this big whale; since that date
the catch in Canadian waters has been thirteen hundred and forty-five
whales. Ignoring the oil altogether and putting the "bone" (baleen) at
two thousand pounds each whale and the value of it at five dollars a
pound, both conservative figures, we find that thirteen and a half
millions in whale-values have gone out of this Canadian sea-pasture the
past twenty years, by the back-door route.
Are there as good fish in the sea as have come out of it? Expert
evidence differs. Captain George B. Leavitt, of the _Narwhal_, in 1907
lowered twenty-two times without striking and yet went out with fifteen
whales. He says he saw that season more whales than any year previous,
but that they are on the move east and north.
The general practice is for a ship to reach this water from San
Francisco in the early summer; whale as long as the ice will permit; go
into winter quarters at Herschel; get out of the ice as soon as possible
next summer, probably the first week in July; whale as long as it can
stay without getting nipped by the new ice of September; carry out its
catch through Bering Strait to San Francisco as late as possible;
dispose of the cargo; refit; return next season, and do it all over
again. The active whaling-season is restricted to eight or ten weeks,
and every one on board a whaler from captain to galley-devil works on a
lay. The captain gets one-twelfth of the take, the first mate one
twenty-second, the second mate one-thirtieth, the third mate one
forty-fifth, the carpenter one seventy-fifth, the steward one eightieth,
fore-mast sailors one eightieth, green hands one two-hundredth.
Engineers get about one hundred and twenty dollars a month straight. It
looks all right in the contract signed a year ago in a San Francisco
waterfront dive, but it never works out as it looks on paper. The A.B.
overdraws from the slop-chest (often before the whale is caught) the
vulgar-fraction which stands for his share of fat things, and you come
across him possessed of the sulky mood which dining on dead horse (land
or marine) induces in most of us.
A trade in fur also makes out by this Pacific-Arctic, Arctic-Pacific
route. We estimate that total products to the value of a million and a
half find their way each year out of Canada in the ships of the
whaling-fleet. "The farther north the finer fur" is a recognised law.
The American ship brings flour, provisions, Krag-Jorgensen guns,
ammunition, tea, trinkets to the Eskimo, and receive for these the
choicest furs this continent produces.
The Canadian Provinces which propinquity would seem to call to this
international whale-joust are British Columbia and Alberta. British
Columbia, in her splendid whaling-stations and refineries on Vancouver
Island, has tasted whale-blood, the blood of the Humpback and Sulphur
bottom, the Orca or Killer, the Cachalot or true Sperm, and one would
think her appetite sufficiently whetted to want to acquire the "feel" of
Arctic Bowhead profits, the fattest dividend-sheets of them all. Alberta
claims as rich hinterland all the coal and gas and timber, tar, furs,
feathers, and fish between the parallel of 60° and the uttermost edge of
things. These winning bulks of blubber should by all laws of the game be
hers. Some day Alberta's metropolis on the Saskatchewan, overcoming the
rapids on the Athabasca and the Slave, will send her deep-sea vessels by
interior waterways to pull down into Canadian pockets a tardy share of
these leviathans. Will there be any left? It is hard to say.
Little wind-swept island of Herschel! We reach you to-day not by
deep-sea vessel from the westward but up through the continent by its
biggest northward-trending stream. Eighty miles through the Northern
Ocean itself from the Mackenzie mouth brings our whale-boat grating upon
the shingle. "As far as we go!" This is essentially the Island of
Whales, the farthest north industrial centre in America, the world's
last and most lucrative whaling-ground. It is well to take our bearings.
We are in latitude 69-1/2° N. and just about 139° west of Greenwich; we
are a full thousand miles nearer our Pole than the Tierra del Fuegan in
South America is to his. And it blows. A nor'easter on Herschel never
dies in debt to a sou'wester. Lifting itself one thousand feet above
sea-level, this septentrional shelter for ships where the seagulls wheel
at our approach, and as they wheel, whine like lost souls, is
twenty-three miles in circumference, with neither water nor fuel. For
six months every year comparative darkness wraps it around. Snow and ice
hold it fast till mid-July; and yet people with tropic isles to choose
from and green valleys where the meadow-lark sings have crowded here for
twenty years to make their home!
The most incongruous lot that Fate ever jostled together into one
corner,--who are they? The whaler of every country and complexion from
Lascar to Swede, Eskimo men and women and big-eyed babies, half-caste
hybrids of these two factors, Missionaries, and Mounted Police. It is
interesting to note the order of their arrival. The whaler drawn by oily
lure followed the Bowhead east and north from Bering Sea. To man his
boats, to hunt caribou for him, and to furnish temporary spouses, the
whaler picked up and attached to his ménage the Eskimo from the mainland
in little bunches _en famille_. Ensuing connubial complications brought
the missionary on the scene. To keep the whaler and the missionary from
each other's throats, and incidentally to make it easy for the American
citizen to trade in Canadian baleen and blubber, came the debonair Royal
Northwest Mounted Policeman, the red-coated incarnation of Pax
Britannica. There winter at Herschel every year two hundred and fifty
whalers and an equal number of Kogmollye and Nunatalmute Eskimo.
Pauline Cove on Herschel Island has three fathoms of water and can
winter fifty ships. Landing and looking about us, we experience a
feeling of remoteness, of alienation from the world of railroads and
automobiles and opera tickets. Back of the harbour are the officers'
quarters of the whaling company, the barracks of the Royal Northwest
Mounted Police, the huts of the Eskimo; in front of us the clear
panorama of the mountains on the shore-line.
North America here, in profound and lasting loneliness, dips its shaggy
arms and ice-bound capes into an ocean illuminated now by the brief
smile of summer but, for ten months out of the twelve, drear and utterly
desolate. The most striking features of the off-shore islands is that
they are islands of ice rather than of earth. Slightly rising above
ocean-level, they exhibit one or two feet of sandy soil, and between
this scant counterpane and the interior foundations of the earth is
nothing but pure translucent ice. There is going on a rapid
disintegrating of these islands. The whaler calls this far fringe of
America "the ocean graveyard" and "the step-mother to ships." There have
been five wrecks on this coast in recent years: the _Penelope_ off
Shingle Point, the _Bonanza_ off King Point, the _Triton_ on the shores
of Herschel itself, the _Alexander_ near Horton River, a little
missionary craft off Shingle Point, and Mikklesen's ship _The Duchess of
Bedford_, abandoning her ambitious search for a dream-continent in
Beaufort Sea to deposit her tapped-camphor-wood bones on the edge of the
ocean of her quest.
The Mackenzie River carries the freshening influence of its current for
miles out to sea, and the whole mainland coast is piled high with
drift-trees carried by its stream to the Eskimo,--a boon more prized by
them than the most seductive story the missionary can tell of the harps
and golden streets of that strange heaven of the white man where
whale-meat is unknown and blubber enters not.
In July, resurrection comes to Herschel,--saxifrages, white anemones
through the snow, the whoop of the mosquito-hawk, and the wild fox
dodging among the dwarf-junipers and uncovered graves! And the Midnight
Sun? It is not a continual blare of light for twenty-four hours. It
sweeps through the midnight heavens, but between ten o'clock in the
evening and four in the morning there is a sensible change. Colour tints
and lines of demarcation on sea and ships are harder to distinguish,
shadows less clearcut. Birds roost and even flowers close, Nature
whispering to both that, if they would reproduce after their kind in the
short Arctic summer, energies must be conserved. Surely the world holds
nothing more beautiful than this Polar night, this compelling gloaming,
the "cockshut light" of Francis Thompson. Here the evening and the
morning sit together hand in hand, and, even as you watch, lead in the
day, the new day born beneath the starless sky. The July sun stabs into
activity our incongruous community. On board the vessels guns are
cleaned, harpoons pointed, whale-boats caulked, and the winter
deck-house is lifted off bodily. Up in the rigging fox-skins and all the
year's fur-booty sweeten in the sunlight, and eagerly the spring "leads"
in the ice are watched from hour to hour if a way be opened to trend
out in the track of the big Bowhead.
Strange people crowd the fo'castle. Two years ago the ships bound for
"Outside" got nipped in early ice and were forced to winter at Herschel
all unprepared. Reduced to half-rations the crew got weak, and scurvy
threatened. The Mounted Police (who by the way are "mounted" in
imagination only, as there is nothing for the most gallant to stride
here but Husky dogs), in making examination of the men below decks, got
to their enquiries a technical reply that staggered them. One
able-bodied seaman, busied with between-decks blubber, proved to be a
medical man with degrees from two colleges. He subsequently made at the
request of the Police a searching report on the state of health of the
island community, adding suggestions for its improvement. The report was
signed "T.H. Toynbee Wright, M.D.," and, after making it, the A.B., M.D.
saluted, donned his oily overalls, and turned once more to the savoury
spoils of the Bowhead. Which all goes to prove that in these latitudes
"you never can tell."
Whale-men at Herschel give whales five names according to age and size:
they are "suckers" under a year, "short-heads" as long as they are
suckled, "stunts" at two years, "skull-fish" with baleen less than six
feet long, and "size-fish" at the age when a boy reaches man's estate. A
whale needs no re-incarnation theory of the theosophist, for he crowds
enough experience into one sea-life to satisfy the fact-thirst of the
greediest little Gradgrind. Fancy, thrashing the sea for a thousand
years! A "sucker" who happened to be disporting round the British Isles
when Alfred the Great was burning those historic cakes and prefiguring
with candles the eight-hour day may still be chasing whale-brit round an
Arctic iceberg. The whale mates, we are told, once and for keeps.
Jogging along from one ocean end to another with the same wife for a
thousand years without turning fluke to look at an affinity! Shades of
Chicago and Pittsburg, hide your wings! Whales follow their annual
migration as regularly as do moose and caribou on land, the seal and
salmon in the Pacific. Seen first in May in Bering Strait, the Bowheads
trend from here north and east, doubling back on their westward journey
in July and August, when the Herschel Island whalers go out to intercept
them. September sees the great mammals off Southern Kamchatka, and year
by year with regularity they follow this Arctic orbit, edging farther in
successive seasons to the north and east. The usual track of any family
of whales may be left at a tangent on account of a furious storm,
excessive cold, the want of food, the harassing of an enemy, or a change
in the season of their amours.
A whale, for an old party, is not so slow. Alarmed while extended
motionless at the surface of the sea, he can sink in five or six seconds
beyond the reach of human enemies. His velocity along the surface
horizontally, diving obliquely or perpendicularly, seems to be the same,
a rate of from twelve to fourteen miles an hour. Now, to carry a whale
of seventy-four tons through the Arctic at the rate of twelve miles an
hour would require a (sea) horse-power of one hundred and forty-five.
Captain Scoresby, a whale expert, by careful calculation estimates that
a surface of two square miles of the Arctic Ocean contains
23,888,000,000,000,000 of the minute animalculae on which the Bowhead
feeds, so we hope there is enough to go round. 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. Imagination sees opportunity in
this for establishing hyperborean letter-service between lovers kept
apart by cruel ice-floes. Eskimo Evangeline wandering under Northern
Lights seeking Dusky Gabriel might find here a carrier-pigeon of
utility. Is it not Pliny who gives us a delightful account of Hippo's
enamoured dolphin?
Captain Kelly was the first to notice that whales sing One Sunday,
while officers from three ships were "gamming" over their afternoon
walrus-meat, Kelly dropped his glass with, "I hear a Bowhead!" There was
much chaffing about "Kelly's band," but Kelly weighed anchor and went to
find the band-wagon. Every sail followed his, and the result was the
bagging of three whales. Among Bowheads, this sing-song is a call made
by the leader of a school as he forces passage through Bering Sea to
give notice to those who follow that the straits are clear of ice.
Walruses and seals and all true mammals having lungs and living in the
water have a bark that sounds weird enough coming up from hidden depths.
Every look-out from a mast-head notices that, when one whale is struck,
at the very impact of the harpoon the whole school is "gallied" or
stampeded as they hear the death-song. The dying swan may not sing, but
there is no doubt about the ante-mortem Valkyrie song of the whale. From
the Bowhead the sound comes like the drawn-out "hoo-hoo-oo-oo-oo" of the
hoot-owl. A whaler stops coiling his harpoon-line to tell you that
"beginning on 'F' the cry may rise to 'A,' 'B,' or even 'C' before
slipping back to 'F' again." He assures us that, "with the Humpback the
tone is much finer, sounding across the water like the 'E' string of a
violin."
Whalers themselves on this grim shore die without requiem. Every year
men desert from the ships. They make their way across from Herschel to a
mainland of whose geography they know nothing, thinking that once they
strike the shore they can find railway trains which will take them to
the gold-mines. One man, Morand, left his ship without sled or dogs. He
carried only a gun, twenty rounds of ammunition, some cigarette papers
and tobacco. In the spring they found him about a day's journey from the
ship, frozen to death. He sat with his gun leaning against his left arm,
and a cigarette in his mouth. Both feet and one hand were eaten off. He
had fired off nine shots, probably as a signal which was never heard.
[Illustration: Breeding Grounds of the Seals]
Within recent years, on other shores but this one, an innovation has
entered the whaling business. The modern plan is to have
shore-refineries and from these strategic bases to send out
strongly-built high-speed steamers to shoot detonating harpoons from a
cannon into the whale. Such methods are pursued with profit on
Newfoundland and Vancouver Island shores. The gun-harpoon, the invention
of Sven Foyn, a Norwegian, is furnished at the point with a contrivance
which, as it enters the whale, opens out anchor-like flukes which
clutch his vitals. Connected by a line to the whaling-steamer, the
harpoon holds the quarry until the whaler steams alongside, when the
"fish" is soon dispatched. A nozzle is attached to the harpoon-wound,
and hot air from the engine pumped into the "proposition" keeps it
afloat. The Vancouver Island station has bagged as many as five whales
in one day,--Cachalots, Humpbacks, and Sulphur-Bottoms.
The Eskimo say, "There is no part of a seal that is not good," and the
same applies to whales. Blubber and bone have their regular markets. The
viscera, scraps of fat and oddments tried out in fiery furnaces, appear
in the form of pungent snuff-like powder, a much-sought fertiliser. From
the Vancouver Island stations it goes across to enrich the cane-fields
of Honolulu and the rose-gardens of Nippon. The Japs are eager customers
for the dried or smoked whale-meat; and whale-steak broiled to a turn
can scarcely be distinguished from choice porterhouse, since it is
absolutely free from fishy taste. Far back in the fourteenth century the
Biscayans made whale-venison their staple, and Norway to-day has more
than one establishment which turns out canned whale. Newfoundlanders
find whale-meat a welcome change from cod perpetual, and I have seen the
Indians of Cape Flattery eat it when it hailed you a mile to windward
and had more than begun to twine like a giddy honeysuckle. Now,
enterprising people are talking of canning whales' milk, a dense yellow
fluid like soft tallow. When the milk-maid goes out to milk a whale she
must take half a dozen barrels along as milking pails. The Eskimo like
it. Soon the soda-fountains on Fort Macpherson and Herschel Island will
bear the legend, "Whale cream soda" and "Best Whale Milkshake."
To have an even superficial knowledge of the commercial products of the
whale, one must learn of baleen, of whale-oils and spermaceti, of
ambergris, whale-guano, whale-ivory, and whale-leather.
What do we do with baleen? It so combines lightness, elasticity, and
flexibility, that nothing yet invented adapts itself so perfectly to all
the requirements of the fashionable corset. Whalebone whips are made
from single pieces of baleen seven or eight feet long. A whalebone
horsewhip costs from fifteen to eighteen dollars and will outlast a
dozen cheaper persuaders. The Sairy Gamp umbrella of the last
generation, which boasted whalebone ribs, never "broke its mighty heart"
in a rainstorm (and incidentally could never be shut up tight). Flexible
steel has taken the place of whalebone in many of the arts; but new
avenues of usefulness open up to baleen. Out of it artificial feathers
of exquisite lightness and wigs or toupees are made. Shredded into fine
filaments, baleen is now woven in with the other fibres in the
manufacture of the finest French silks, imparting resilience and
elasticity to the rich material. A Chicago paper of the date of this
writing advertises:
WHALEBONE TEETH $5
A GREAT DISCOVERY
THE NEW WHALEBONE PLATE WHICH IS THE LIGHTEST
AND STRONGEST SET KNOWN
DOES NOT COVER THE ROOF OF THE MOUTH
Guaranteed ten years
YOU BITE CORN OFF THE COB
Spermaceti, the solid waxy body carried round in the Cachalot's head in
solution, is a valuable whale-product. Bland and demulcent, spermaceti
is employed as an ingredient in ointments, cosmetics, and cerates.
Spermaceti candles of definite size form the measure of electric light,
giving rise to the phrase "of so many candle-power." Present-day
spermaceti is both a saving and a destructive agent. Large quantities of
it are used in Europe in the manufacture of ecclesiastical candles, and
part of the same consignment may help to make self-lubricating
cartridges.
Most valuable of all whale-products, the costliest commodity on this
earth ounce for ounce with the one exception of radium, is ambergris. As
amber was once considered "the frozen tears of seagulls," so ambergris
for ages puzzled the ancients. Some called it "the solidified foam of
the sea," with others it was a "fungoidal growth of the ocean analogous
to that on trees." When people in the old days came across anything
exceedingly costly they wanted to eat it, on the same principle which
makes the baby put each new gift into his mouth. So we have historic
record of pearl soup a la Cleopatra, and dishes dashed with ambergris.
Milton sings of,--
"Beasts of chase, or fowl of game,
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled,
Grisamber-steamed."
What is this choice tidbit? It is a morbid secretion of the intestines
of the sick Sperm-whale, and sells for from thirty to forty dollars an
ounce. Ambergris, if discovered in the animal itself, is always in a
dead or dying body, but it is usually found floating on the ocean or
cast up on the shore. Many a day, as kiddies on Vancouver Island
beaches, have we turned over bunches of kelp, trying to smell out that
solid, fatty, inflammable dull grey substance with its sweet earthy
odour. The present-day use of ambergris is to impart to perfumes a
floral fragrance. It has the power to intensify and fix any odour. In
pharmacy, it is regarded as a cardiac and anti-spasmodic and as a
specific against the rabies. For years it has been used in sacerdotal
rites of the church; and suitors of old times sought with it to charm
their mistresses. The dying sperm, spouting up the ghost, offers of his
very vitals to aid the lover and serve the church.
Fascinating are the finds of ambergris. The barque _Sea-Fox_ of New
Bedford, in 1866, off the coast of Arabia, took a one hundred and
fifty-six pound mass of ambergris, which was sold to the Arabs of
Zanzibar for ten thousand dollars in gold. The _Adeline Gibbs_, in the
same year, took one hundred and thirty-two pounds from a bull-sperm
south of St. Helena, and sold the hunk for twenty-three thousand
dollars. Three winters ago an Arctic whaling-crew put into Seattle, and
there leaked out the interesting story of how, not recognising the
priceless unguent, they had greased their oars, masts, and knee-boots
with "a big lump of ambergrease."
In modern whaling not an ounce of the carcase is cast as rubbish to the
void. The intestines make a soft kid which takes any dye and is largely
used for artistic leather-work. The size of these immense strips makes
possible splendid belts for machinery with a minimum of joinings. The
chemically-macerated bones are turned into an "indestructible"
crockery-ware which is far more enduring than anything made of
vegetable-fibre. The Beluga gives us the best shoe-strings in the world.
You can lace your shoes with a Beluga lace for two years and be sure it
will not break the morning you are in an especial hurry to catch an
inter-Reuben train.
An interest attaches to living whales which outweighs the fascination
with which we study their dead parts. Each species of the whale
propagates with one of its own species only. The fidelity of whales to
each other exceeds the constancy of birds. The whale mother gives birth
to one calf, and in extremely rare cases two calves, producing every
second year, the young being born between the end of March and the
beginning of May. When the mother suckles her young she throws herself
on one side on the surface of the sea and the calf regularly feeds at
the breast (like a young Eskimo) for nearly two years. During this time
the baby is extremely fat and the mother correspondingly emaciated.
Perhaps nothing in nature is more touching than the devotion of a female
whale to its wounded young. Whalers harpoon the babe at the breast so
that they may afterwards secure the dam. In this case, the mother joins
the wounded young under the surface of the water, comes up with it when
it rises to breathe, encourages it to swim off, assists its flight by
taking it under her fin, and seldom deserts it while life remains.
Unless the Circumpolar Bowhead is to become extinct within a decade, the
thinking world should strengthen the hands of the Canadian authorities
in an effort to put a close season for four or five years on the great
Arctic Baleen Whale. At their rate of reproduction it is not so easy to
restock a whale pasture as a salmon stream. Cutting down a whale which
has taken ten centuries to grow is like cutting down an oak-tree with a
thousand concentric rings. You cannot in one or two or twenty scant
generations of man grow another one to take its place.