“Oh, the rare old Whale, ’mid storm and gale,
In his ocean home will be
A giant in might where might is right,
And King of the boundless sea.”
_From “Moby Dick.”_
No animal in prehistoric or historic times has ever exceeded the
whale, in either size or strength, which explains perhaps its survival
from ancient times. Few people have any idea of the relative size of
the whale compared with other animals. A large specimen weighs about
ninety tons, or thirty times as much as an elephant, which beside a
whale appears about as large as a dog compared to an elephant. It is
equivalent in bulk to one hundred oxen, and outweighs a village of one
thousand people. If cut into steaks and eaten, as in Japan, it would
supply a meal to an army of one hundred and twenty thousand men.
[Illustration: A French lithograph showing the comparative sizes of a
whale, an elephant, a horse, and a giraffe.]
Whales have often exceeded one hundred feet in length, and George Brown
Goode, in his report on the United States Fisheries, mentions a finback
having been killed that was one hundred and twenty feet long. A whale’s
head is sometimes thirty-five feet in circumference, weighs thirty
tons, and has jaws twenty feet long, which open thirty feet wide to a
mouth that is as large as a room twenty feet long, fifteen feet high,
nine feet wide at the bottom, and two feet wide at the top. A score of
Jonahs standing upright would not have been unduly crowded in such a
chamber.
The heart of a whale is the size of a hogshead. The main blood artery
is a foot in diameter, and ten to fifteen gallons of blood pour out at
every pulsation. The tongue of a right whale is equal in weight to ten
oxen, while the eye of all whales is hardly as large as a cow’s, and
is placed so far back that it has in direction but a limited range of
vision. The ear is so small that it is difficult to insert a knitting
needle, and the brain is only about ten inches square. The head, or
“case,” contains about five hundred barrels, of ten gallons each, of
the richest kind of oil, called spermaceti.
One of these giants, when first struck by a harpoon, can go as fast as
a steam yacht, twenty or twenty-five miles an hour, but it soon slows
down to its usual speed of about twelve miles, developing about one
hundred and forty-five horse-power.
Mr. Roy C. Andrews, of the American Museum of Natural History, New
York, was on a whaler ninety feet long, which struck a finback whale,
and he says that for seven hours the whale towed the vessel, with
engines going at full speed astern, almost as though it had been a
rowboat.
The whale’s young are about twelve feet long at birth, and can swim
as soon as they are born. So faithfully does the cow whale watch over
her offspring when they are together that she will rarely move when
attacked for fear of leaving the young whale unprotected, or of hurting
it if she thrashes round to escape capture. It is believed that whales
sometimes live to attain the age of eight hundred years. They sleep
at the bottom of the ocean, which fact shows that they do not inhale
air when asleep, like the warm-blooded animals, and to help them in
breathing below the surface they have a large reservoir of blood to
assist circulation. This spot is known to whalemen as the “life” of the
whale. When “sounding” to a great depth it is estimated that the whale
bears on its back the weight of twenty battleships. The strength and
power of a whale are described as almost unbelievable.