size is the most striking characteristic, greatly exaggerated. Giants
are always said to be much larger than they really are, as tested by
rigid measurements. To say nothing of the fabulous dimensions given by
older writers, even Beale, who had immense opportunities of actual
observation, says that one captured in the Japan seas measured 84 feet
in length. Such statements, however intended in good faith, can never be
relied upon; the difficulties and sources of fallacy in making such
measurements are very great, and we are not assured whether the length
is taken, as it should be, in a straight line between the front end of
the head and the middle of the end of the tail, or following the curves
of the surface of the body, which of course would give a considerably
greater length. I have taken pains to obtain careful measurements of all
the skeletons available of perfectly adult or even aged animals in
various museums which I have visited, and it is curious how nearly alike
they are. Allowing for the distance between the vertebræ and for the
soft parts at either end, about 55 feet seems to be the usual length of
the male sperm whale, and I have never been able to find any substantial
proof that any one has even attained the length of 60 feet, fairly
measured. The skeleton at Burton Constable, prepared from a whale which
came ashore on the Yorkshire coast in 1825, is that of a very aged
animal, and now measures 48 feet 4 inches in length, the vertebræ being
articulated in close apposition, but even if 10 feet are allowed in
addition, this would not bring it up to 60 feet. In the museum of the
Royal College of Surgeons is a lower jaw presented by the late Mr. W. L.
Crowther, of Hobart Town, which was considered as that of the largest
sperm whale ever killed in the Tasmanian seas, and quite unique on
account of its size. It only measures one inch more than the jaw of the
Yorkshire specimen. The female of this species, contrary to what occurs
among the whalebone whales, is very much smaller than the male.
The products of the sperm whale which render it commercially valuable
when killed are (1) sperm oil, obtained by boiling the thick coating of
blubber which everywhere envelops the body of the animal; (2)
spermaceti, contained in the great cavity on the top of the head; (3)
ambergris, formerly used in medicine, and now in perfumery--a concretion
formed in the intestine of this whale, and often found floating on the
surface of the seas it inhabits. Its genuineness is proved by the
presence of the horny beaks of the cephalopods on which the whale feeds.
The capture or “fishery” of the sperm whale will be spoken of later on
in conjunction with that of the other species of whales.
All the other large whales which are of importance to man belong to the
group called “whalebone whales,” because they are provided with a
remarkable apparatus in the mouth for the purpose of obtaining their
food, to which the rather misleading name of “whalebone” has been
given,--a name for which naturalists have substituted “baleen”; but the
former is so completely engrafted into our language, especially in all
commercial transactions connected with the subject, that it will
probably last as long as the material itself, although it is now well
known that it has nothing to do with “bone” in the ordinary acceptation
of the word. What whalebone actually is was apparently a mystery to our
forefathers. Belon in 1551 hazarded the conjecture that it was the
eyebrows of the whale; but others thought that it was the apparatus by
which it steered itself through the water. This notion is probably
connected with the old feudal law cited by Blackstone (vol. i. p. 233),
that the tails of all whales belonged to the Queen as a perquisite to
furnish her Majesty’s wardrobe with whalebone. The whalebone whales have
no teeth in either jaw (except some of a most rudimentary nature, which
disappear even before birth), but in the place teeth usually occupy in
the upper jaw, or rather upon each side of the palate, the whalebone
grows. This consists of flattened horny plates, several hundred in
number on each side, separated by a narrow bare interval along the
middle line. The chemical composition and general character of these
plates resemble those of hair, horn, or hoof. In minute structure they
more nearly resemble the horn of the rhinoceros than any other similar
growth. They are placed transversely to the long axis of the palate,
with very short spaces between them. Each plate or blade is somewhat
triangular in form, with the base attached to the palate and the apex
hanging downwards. The outer edge of the blade is hard and smooth, but
the inner edge and apex fray out into long bristly fibres, so that the
roof of the whale’s mouth looks as if covered with hair, as described by
Aristotle. As the bony palate is more or less arched from before
backwards, the blades are longest near the middle of the series, and
gradually diminish towards the front and back of the mouth.
The use of the whalebone to the whale is to strain the water from the
small marine molluscs, crustaceans, or fish upon which the whales
subsist. In feeding they fill the immense mouth with water containing
shoals of these small creatures, and then on their closing the jaws and
raising the tongue, so as to diminish the cavity of the mouth, the water
streams out through the narrow intervals between the hairy fringe of the
whalebone blades, and escapes through the lips, leaving the living prey
to be swallowed. In the different kinds of whales, which I shall now
speak of, there are great differences in the character of the baleen. In
the Californian grey whale (_Rachianectes glaucus_), an animal which
attains a length of from 30 to 40 feet, the baleen blades are fewer than
two hundred on each side, and far apart, very short (the longest being
from 14 to 16 inches in length), coarse, and inelastic, light brown or
nearly white in colour. From this there is a gradual transition, through
the rorquals or finners, the humpbacks, the southern right whales, up to
the Greenland whale, which exhibits this structure in its greatest
perfection, both for the purposes it serves in the animal economy, and
for the uses to which it has been applied by man.
All the known whalebone whales may be divided into five different groups
or _genera_, as they are called by naturalists, the first of which
(genus _Balæna_) have long been distinguished by practical whalers as
“right whales,” as they are, compared to all the others, the right
whales to catch, being of far the greater commercial value. They are
readily distinguished externally by the perfectly smooth back, without
any trace of a dorsal fin, and by the skin of the throat and chest being
also smooth, whereas in most of the other forms this region presents a
number of deep longitudinal plaits or furrows. Of the right whales there
are two perfectly distinct forms, though whether each of these
represents a single species, or can be subdivided into several, is still
a matter of uncertainty, and for our present purpose of little
importance, as if minute investigation can prove that they are
separable, they are most closely allied and perfectly similar to all
ordinary observation. The two forms, which I shall speak of as species
or kinds, are the Greenland or rather Arctic right whale (_Balæna
mysticetus_) and the southern right whale (_Balæna australis_).
[Illustration: FIG. 9.]
The Arctic right whale (Fig. 9), when full grown, attains the length of
from 45 to 50 feet, a size which, as in the case of the sperm whale, has
generally been greatly exaggerated in old descriptions. As is apparently
the case in all whalebone whales, but contrary to what occurs in the
sperm whale, the female is rather larger than the male. Its external
form is shown in Fig. 9, from a careful drawing by Mr. Robert Gray. In
this species all the peculiarities which distinguish the head and mouth
of the whales from those of other mammals have attained their greatest
development. The head is of enormous size, exceeding one-third of the
whole length of the creature. The cavity of the mouth is fully as large
as that of the body, chest and abdomen together. The upper jaw is very
narrow but greatly arched from before backwards, to increase the height
of the cavity and allow for the great length of the baleen or
“whalebone” blades. The enormous rami of the lower jaw are widely
separated behind, and have a still farther outward sweep before they
meet in front, giving the floor of the mouth the shape of an immense
spoon. The baleen blades attain the number of 380 or more on each side,
and those in the middle of the series have a length of 10 or sometimes
12 feet. They are black in colour, fine, and highly elastic in texture,
and fray out at the inner edge and ends into long, delicate, soft,
almost silky, but very tough hairs. The remarkable development of the
mouth, and of the structures in connection with it, which distinguishes
the right whale among its allies is entirely in relation to the nature
of its food. It is by this apparatus that it is enabled to avail itself
of the minute but highly nutritious crustaceans and pteropods which
swarm in immense shoals in the seas it frequents. The large mouth
enables it to take in at one time a sufficient quantity of water filled
with these small organisms, and the length and delicate structure of the
baleen provide a sufficient strainer or hair-sieve by which the water
can be drained off. If the baleen were rigid, and only as long as is the
aperture between the upper and lower jaws when the mouth is shut, a
space would be left beneath it when the jaws are separated, through
which the water and the minute particles of food would escape together.
But instead of this, the long, slender, brush-like, elastic ends of the
whalebone blades fold back when the mouth is closed, the front ones
passing below the hinder ones in a channel lying between the tongue and
the lower jaw. When the mouth is opened their elasticity causes them to
straighten out like a bow unbent, so that at whatever distance the jaws
are separated the strainer remains in perfect action, filling the whole
of the interval. The mechanical perfection of the arrangement is
completed by the great development of the lower lip, which rises stiffly
above the jawbone, and prevents the long, slender, flexible ends of the
baleen from being carried outwards by the rush of water from the mouth,
when its cavity is being diminished by the closure of the jaws and
raising of the tongue.
If, as appears highly probable, the “bowhead” or right whale of the
Okhotsk Sea and Behring Strait belongs to this species, its range is
circumpolar, but it is strictly limited to the icy seas of the north.
“Though,” as Scammon says, “it is true that these animals are pursued in
the open water during the summer months, in no instance have we learned
of their being captured south of where winter ice-fields are
occasionally met with.” In the Behring Sea it is seldom seen south of
the 55th parallel, and the southern limit of its range in the North Sea
has been ascertained by Eschricht and Reinhardt to be from the east
coast of Greenland at 64° N. lat. along the north of Iceland towards
Spitzbergen. Though found in the seas on both sides of Greenland, and
passing freely from one to the other, it is never seen so far south as
Cape Farewell; but on the Labrador coast, where a cold stream sets down
from the north, its range is somewhat further. There is no authentic
instance of its having been seen or captured upon any European coast.
[Illustration: FIG. 10.]
The southern right whale, or “black whale” (Fig. 10), as it is often
called by whalers, attains about the same length as the last, but
differs in being more slender in form, in possessing a smaller head in
proportion to the body, shorter baleen (scarcely more than half the
length), a differently shaped contour of the upper margin of the lower
lip, and a greater number of vertebræ. Animals of this group closely
resembling each other have been found abundantly in the temperate seas
of both hemispheres, North Atlantic and North Pacific (where they are
regularly hunted by the Japanese), and in the neighbourhood of the Cape
of Good Hope, Kerguelen’s Island, Australia, and New Zealand, but
according to Captain Maury’s charts they are never or rarely seen in the
tropical seas. It is chiefly this supposed isolation of distribution
rather than any constant distinctive characters which has given rise to
the idea that the North Atlantic whale (called _Balæna biscayensis_),
the Japanese (_B. japonica_), the Cape whale (_B. australis_), and the
New Zealand whale (_B. antipodarum_), must be of different species.
Until more numerous specimens of skeletons are procured for our museums,
or more accurate descriptions can be obtained, the question cannot be
satisfactorily determined.
The whalebone whales, not called right whales, are (1) the humpback
(_Megaptera_), or “hunchback” (Fig. 11), so called by whalers on account
of the low hump-like form of the dorsal fin. In Dudley’s account of the
whales of the New England coast (_Phil. Trans._ 1725), the fourth
species is “The bunch or humpback whale, distinguished from the right
whale by having a bunch standing in the place where the fin does in the
finback. This bunch is as big as a man’s head, and a foot high, shaped
like a plug pointing backwards.” A better distinction from all other
whalebone whales is the immense length of the pectoral fins or flippers,
which are indented or scalloped along their margins. The usual length of
the adult ranges from 45 to 50 feet. The baleen plates are short and
broad, and of a deep black colour. This whale has a very wide range,
being found, with no important differences, in both the North and South
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and from Greenland to South Georgia. When
caught it yields a fair supply of oil, but much less than the right
whales, and its whalebone is of very inferior quality.
[Illustration: FIG. 11.]
[Illustration: FIG. 12.]
(2) The rorquals, or finners (_Balænoptera_) (Fig. 12). These have the
plicated skin of the throat like that of the humpback, the furrows being
more numerous and close set, but the pectoral fins are comparatively
small, and the dorsal fin distinct, compressed, and triangular. The head
is comparatively small and flat, and pointed in front, the whalebone
short and coarse, the body long and slender, and the tail very much
compressed before it expands into the “flukes.” The rorquals are perhaps
the most abundant and widely distributed of all the whales, being found
in all seas, except the extreme Arctic and probably Antarctic regions.
Owing to the small quantity and inferior quality of their whalebone, the
comparatively limited amount of blubber or subcutaneous fat, their great
activity, and the difficulty of capturing them by the old methods, these
whales were not until recently an object of pursuit by whale-fishers;
but since the introduction of steam-vessels, and especially of explosive
harpoons fired from guns in the place of those hurled by the human hand,
a regular fishery of “finbacks” has been established on the coast of
Finmark, where many hundreds are killed every year, their bodies being
towed to shore for the purpose of flensing. Some of the rorquals attain
the largest size of any of the _Cetacea_, the blue whale (_Balænoptera
sibbaldii_), not unfrequent in the British Seas, reaching a length of 80
or perhaps 85 feet when fully adult. On the other hand, one common
species (_B. rostrata_) never exceeds 30 feet in length.
(3) Besides these there are other two forms of whalebone whales not
reckoned as right whales, the grey whale of the North Pacific
(_Rhachianectes glaucus_), and a small and very peculiar species from
the seas around New Zealand and Australia (_Neobalæna marginata_); but
these being very local in distribution, and of little value except for
museums, are more interesting from a scientific than from a commercial
point of view.
I now proceed to the next part of my subject--the pursuit and capture of
whales by man for the sake of the materials they yield, which are of
value in commerce. The method universally followed is attacking the
animal when it comes to the surface of the water to breathe by means of
a weapon called a harpoon, with an iron sharp-pointed barbed head, and
to the shaft of which is attached a strong line. In former days this was
always thrown by the hand, and to do so effectually required great skill
on the part of the man who wielded it. Now the harpoon is generally
projected from a gun, which carries a considerably greater distance than
could be traversed by a hand-thrown weapon, and the necessity of
approaching so closely to the animal is avoided. Various methods to
increase the efficacy of harpoons have also been introduced including
devices by which they explode within the body of the victim. Long
straight spears or lances are also used to despatch the animal when it
has been secured by the line attached to the harpoon. The whale is
always approached by rowing in a boat as closely to it as necessary.
These boats may be directly connected with a station on the coast or
with a ship out at sea. This gives rise to the primary division of whale
fishing into two principal methods: shore fishing and open-sea fishing,
both of which are extensively practised in various parts of the world.
In the first, a look out is kept from a station on some projecting
headland, and when a whale appears within sight signals are given on
which the boats go out in pursuit, and when a capture takes place the
body is towed to shore for the purpose of obtaining its valuable
products. In the second, the ships sail to some distant part of the open
sea, where it is supposed that whales are likely to be met with. The
look out is kept from the “crow’s nest” on the masthead, and the boats
being all in readiness row out in pursuit the moment a whale is sighted,
and if successful tow their prey to the side of the vessel.
As I mentioned before, all cetaceans have immediately beneath their
skin, and closely connected with it, a very dense layer of what is
called “blubber,” in large whales as much as a foot in thickness,
composed of a network of cellular tissue, the interspaces of which are
filled with oil. This layer, though so adherent to the outer skin as to
be separated from it with difficulty, is only connected with the flesh
or muscles which lie below by loose tissue, and so is easily stripped
off. With a large whale this process, called “flensing,” is effected as
follows. If the animal is caught at sea, the carcass is lashed alongside
the ship, and men with spikes in their shoes, descend upon the slippery
surface, and with large sharp-edged spades perform the cutting part of
the operation, having first fixed, by means of a hook, a strong rope
into the blubber at the junction of the head and the body. This rope
runs over pulleys fixed to the rigging of the ship, and the blubber,
separated by the spades into strips about two or three feet broad, is
gradually hauled up on to the deck of the ship. The cuts being made in a
spiral direction round the body of the whale, the blubber is stripped
off from head to tail, much as a spiral roller or bandage might be, the
body of the whale meanwhile performing a rotatory motion. When the
blubber is brought on board, it is cut up into smaller pieces, and
either stowed in casks or tanks to be brought home to undergo the next
process, that of “trying out,” or if the voyage is of lengthened
duration, as in the case of the South Sea whalers hailing from European
or American ports, this is done on board the ship. It simply consists of
boiling the blubber in large iron pots until the oil is separated from
the mesh of cellular tissue which contained it, the latter being
generally used for fuel in subsequent boilings. In the case of the sperm
whale the upper surface of the great head is opened, and the liquid
spermaceti is baled out of the cavities which contain it, and in the
case of the whalebone whales the whalebone is removed from the mouth.
All the rest of the animal being useless is turned adrift into the sea,
and speedily becomes the prey of voracious sharks and other fish and sea
birds. When whales are caught near the shore, as in many of the
“fisheries,” from boats without the intervention of sea-going vessels,
they are towed into shallow water for the purpose of flensing and
removing the whalebone.
The earliest known regular whale fishery is that which took place from
the Basque towns of France and Spain, Bayonne, Biarritz, St. Jean de
Luz, Fuenterrabia, St. Sebastian, Guetaria, Ondarroa, and many others.
From the tenth century onwards the hardy fishermen of the towns and
villages of this coast pursued the Atlantic right whales in the Bay of
Biscay, at first only catching them from open boats near the shore, but
afterwards, as the whales became more scarce and the whalers more
adventurous, following them in ships across the Atlantic to the
Bermudas, Newfoundland, and Iceland. From this source all the whale oil
and all the whalebone used by our forefathers down to the year 1600 was
derived. Queen Elizabeth and all her court depended upon the Basque
fishermen for the most prominent characteristics of their costume. The
supply was, however, diminishing when the attempt to discover the
North-East route to China, about the close of the sixteenth century, led
to the opening up of the sea between Greenland and Spitzbergen, and the
discovery of the Arctic right whale, an animal up to that time
practically unknown to man. This being much more valuable, both on
account of the larger quantity and finer quality of the whalebone it
produced, and also the larger amount of oil, for many years attracted
the principal attention of the whaling ships of Europe. The English
entered into the business at a very early period, but, being
unacquainted with the methods of capturing whales, engaged Basque
harpooners for all their earliest voyages, and closely followed their
methods. The very word “harpoon” is said to be Basque. The Dutch also
took the fishing up on a very extensive scale, and established a
permanent settlement upon the northern shore of Spitzbergen, which they
named “Smeeremberg,” which was the rendezvous of the whaling fleet
during the summer, and to which the blubber was brought for boiling. In
its most flourishing period, about the year 1680, the Dutch whale
fishery employed as many as 260 ships and 14,000 men. When, however, the
whales became scarcer in the neighbourhood of the coast, and the ships
had to seek them further in the open sea, it was found more economical
to bring the blubber direct to Holland, and Smeeremberg was deserted.
The great war at the end of the last century, in which England kept
possession of the North Sea, put an end to the whale fishery, not only
of Holland, but of France and of all other countries which had engaged
in it, and henceforth we maintained a monopoly of the trade. From the
year 1732 to 1824, our government paid bounties, amounting altogether,
it is calculated, to £2,500,000, to vessels engaged in the northern
whaling business, with a view to encourage the enterprise. The ships at
first sailed from London, then Hull, Yarmouth, and Whitby entered into
the field. In 1819 as many as sixty-five ships went to the north from
Hull. Since 1836 no ship has gone from London, and now Dundee and
Peterhead are the only ports in the British Islands which keep up the
northern whale fishery, though on a much more limited scale than
formerly.