BEHEMOTHS OF THE OCEAN
“There is that leviathan, whom Thou hast formed to take his pastime
therein.”--Ps. civ. 26, R.V.
“Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a fish hook?
Or press down his tongue with a cord?
Canst thou put a rope into his nose?
Or pierce his jaw through with a hook?”--JOB xli. 1, R.V.
From the company of hungry merciless Sharks and their relatives, an
easy transition carries us to the largest of Ocean-inhabitants--the
Whale.
Not that sharks and whales belong to the same division in the Animal
Kingdom. Not that they have aught in common beyond the possession
of great size and power. But because of that size and power, they
naturally come together at the close of a sketch of Ocean Life.
Sharks, if not in every respect to be regarded as fully and entirely
Fishes, are yet in most essentials “fish-like.” But Whales belong to a
higher level.
When we reach Whales we leave lower animals behind us; we step upon the
uppermost rungs of the Ladder of Life; we are in the society of Mammals.
At the bottom of that ladder we found microscopic beings, specks of
living jelly, so minute as to be invisible, so primitive as to be
without development, without separate organs. At the top of that ladder
stands Man; far more than animal, by virtue of his mental and spiritual
being; and yet an animal, by virtue of his bodily development.
The physical part of a man marks him as a Mammal. To Mammals belong all
Quadrupeds; but not Birds, not Reptiles, not Fishes.
A whale is not a fish. He is a Mammal. He is warm-blooded. He breathes
air through lungs. He--or rather, she--feeds the young of the race, as
they are fed by quadrupeds and human beings on land. A whale-mother
will fight to the death in defence of her little one.
Nor is the whale the only Mammal of ocean-waters. To this highest
division of backboned creatures belong also the Porpoise, a near
relative of the Whale; and the fierce Walrus, met often by Arctic
travellers; and the gentle Seal, with its pathetic human eyes, and its
warm soft coat, for the sake of which it suffers too frequently cruel
treatment at the hand of man.
Many different kinds of whales inhabit the sea,--such as the Rorqual,
the Hump-backed, the Ziphoid. The two which are most widely known, and
which may be regarded as foremost though unconscious rivals in human
favour, are--the Right Whale, of higher latitudes, and the Sperm Whale
of tropical regions.
[Illustration: A BLUE WHALE
_Face page 254_
]
There is a Right Whale of Atlantic waters, closely related to the Right
or Greenland Whale of Arctic Seas, though in some respects different.
But the Greenland Whale may be taken as the typical specimen of its
race.
And a mighty creature it is; often fifty feet, and sometimes sixty or
seventy, in length. A ribbon passed belt-wise around that massive form,
at its thickest, would need to be something like forty feet in length.
So the Right Whale does not boast a slim waist.
The enormous head, with its capacious cavern of a mouth, takes up about
one-third of the whole body.
An individual of this size weighs some seventy tons. And yet so light
is its make--partly due to the construction of its bones, partly no
doubt to its great lung capacity--that it actually weighs less than
water, and can with the utmost ease float close to the surface.
Indeed, a Greenland whale seldom by choice wanders very far below.
He much prefers to come up and breathe every ten or fifteen minutes;
though, when fleeing from the deadly harpoon, he has been known to stay
under water at a stretch more than three-quarters of an hour. But this
is exceptional.
At the top of the head are a couple of “blow-holes,” through which,
when he rises to the surface, he breathes.
In colouring he is black above, white below. A skin about one inch
thick covers enormous masses of fat, more than a foot in thickness; a
fine warm blanket to guard him from cold, but also, unfortunately for
the whale, an attraction to human beings, for the sake of the oil which
it yields. The outer skin is often thickly overgrown with masses of
barnacles.
Perhaps the most singular thing about this great creature is that
it has no teeth, and that it feeds in consequence upon the lightest
possible fare.
In place of teeth, inside the mouth are massive fringes of whalebone
plates, side by side, smooth on the outer side towards the lips, but
covered within by long dense supplies of hair. Similar horny plates
depend from the roof of the mouth. Since the plates of this “baleen,”
as it is called, are often ten or twelve feet long, and amount in
number to many hundreds, one cannot but imagine that the whale’s mouth
must be packed unpleasantly full of furniture. But they have their use.
As he swims he holds his mouth habitually open--somewhat after the
fashion of the Pelican-fish--and into the vast cave flow multitudes of
small creatures of every kind and description.
Presently a good supply has been collected, all lying on the enormous
tongue, a mass of flesh often as big as a room, some eighteen feet long
by ten wide.
He then nearly closes his jaws, and forces out the water. But the dense
hairy fringes hold back the living creatures, which he proceeds to
swallow. After which he again goes forward, open-mouthed, as before.
In a good many respects the Sperm Whale is a contrast to the Greenland
Whale.
He too is of leviathan-like dimensions; generally from sixty to seventy
feet in length, and not more slender as to his waist. But only the male
Sperm boasts these proportions. The female is, by comparison, a dainty
little being, seldom more than thirty or thirty-five feet long.
A Sperm has one spout-hole, instead of two; and in colour he is black
above, grey below.
In his outlines a marked difference is visible. Looked upon sideways,
the form of the huge square head is precisely like the trunk of an
immense forest tree, cut off short; and the “blow-hole” is situated
close to the end or front of this “truncated” head. The latter is
really a reservoir, containing a large supply of valuable spermaceti
oil, for the sake of which the creature is killed by man.
Instead of a mouth full of hair-fringed “baleen,” these whales have
proper teeth, better suited, one would think, to their size. Their food
too is of a far more substantial kind.
It was told in an earlier chapter how Sperm Whales live mainly on
cuttlefishes; and how sometimes, in midnight combat, they fight and
conquer even the mightiest of those loathsome monsters of the deep.
Sperms are found through wide ranges of the ocean, in most tropical
waters, as far north and as far south as 60° in each direction from the
equator.
But whereas Right Whales of colder seas prefer to hunt in couples
only, Sperm Whales crowd together in large companies. Sometimes, it is
true, lonely specimens are found. They, however, are usually morose
and ill-conditioned brutes, ready to fight even men. It has been
suggested that perhaps they are thus solitary _because_ of their morose
temperament, which has made it impossible for their fellows to put up
with their presence.
Both these huge whales have powerful fluked tails and small flippers.
It is curious that inside the flippers are separate branching bones,
not unlike the bones of a human hand, only covered with thick skin in
one piece, like a fingerless glove.
This rather seems to indicate that the flippers may be of the nature of
hands in embryo.
The Sperm does not come to the surface for air nearly so often as
his Greenland cousin. Regularly once in each hour and ten minutes is
the plan he follows; and then he remains for several minutes at the
surface, going through a series of sixty or seventy mighty puffings and
blowings. After which he vanishes for another hour and ten minutes.
Some pathetic tales have been told of the devotion of a mother-whale to
her infant--she usually has but one at a time.
Early in the present century a harpooner deliberately sent his harpoon
into an infant-whale, hoping thus to take the mother. And he had not
miscalculated the strength of maternal love.
No thought had that poor mother of saving herself by flight. She came
fearlessly close to the boat, seized her wounded little one, and
dragged it away with extraordinary rapidity, using up six hundred feet
of line.
Then she rose again, dashing to and fro in such evident “extreme
agony” that one can only marvel at the men who were able to watch it
unmoved. Two harpoons were flung at her, and failed to strike. A third
succeeded; but still, absorbed in her little one’s peril, she paid no
heed to her own injury, made no effort to get away, and “in the course
of an hour” she was killed.
That was in 1811. The same deed has been lately described by Mr.
Bullen--the slaying of a mother-whale, which, with her infant by her
side, refused to use her great strength in self-defence, lest she might
hurt that little one. Such love as this should surely be respected,
even by rough fishermen.
If not in pity to the whale, another reason would suggest the same
line of conduct. The folly of recklessly slaying the rising generation
is beginning to be apparent. Already the supply of whales threatens to
run short.
Although one may speak of “little ones,” and although they are
genuinely “little,” compared with grown-up specimens, one must not be
led astray by the term. One very young baby-whale, when measured, was
found to be about twenty feet long. A fine strapping infant!