Modern Whaling & Bear-Hunting / A record of present-day whaling with up-to-date appliances in many parts of the world, and of bear and seal hunting in the Arctic regions

by W. G. Burn Murdoch

CHAPTER XXXVIII

In the smoking-room on the way south on board we naturally talk much about fishing, for half our fellow-passengers have been salmon-fishing and there is much comparison of Bags and Rivers. Some have done better than they expected, others growl at their bags, and the season, and at the agent, whoever it was, that put them on to such a bad river. But all are charmed with Norse scenery, and Norse people. We come in for some questioning about bears. There is no invidious comparison between a bag of bears and a creel of salmon; but we have to be careful about whales, for it would be a little rough on the veteran salmon-fisher to cap his best with a yarn on whales: after he has, at length and with the utmost modesty, recounted the fight his fifty-pounder put up, and the hundred yards it took out, it would scarcely be considerate to refer to some fifty-ton or one-hundred-ton whale, and the miles of cable it had reeled off in a twinkling. Of course everyone knows a whale is not a fish—still, the slight similarity is such that whaling yarns are apt to be damping when fishing stories are going; though the true Walton angler is happy catching any size of fish; a six-ounce trout to me, in a Highland burn, is almost as good as a whale. Notwithstanding this delicate tact on our part, whaling was introduced one evening in the smoking-room, and the writer was rather surprised to find that several men had very little idea of the functions of whalebone or its place in the whale’s anatomy, so we had to draw diagrams, such as these here reproduced, to describe shortly the way whalebone works. This is a side view of the head of a finner whale; it shows the outer edges of the whalebone plates that hang round the sides of the upper jaw. The blades vary in thickness in different whales; in the common Balænoptera Borealis, such as this, it measures about a quarter of an inch thick and is about two feet at deepest. The blade has hair on its inside edge. If the whale’s head were cut across between the nose and eye, or corner of its mouth, the section would be like this. These hairs intertwine and form a surface to the palate like a well-worn cocoanut mat. The whale opens its mouth and takes in possibly a ton of water thick with small shrimps, partially closes its jaws and expels the water through the fibrous surface and out between the blades. I suppose by raising the enormous soft plum-coloured tongue (D in section) towards the hairy palate or mat of interwoven hairs at the edge of each plate (CC in section) it prevents the shrimps going out with the water, and the tongue works the shrimps down to its throat. I have not calculated the food which I have seen come out of a whale’s stomach when cut up, but I say, at a rough guess, forty to sixty gallons—three or four barrels of very minute shrimps. I have only seen the remains of one of the Right whale, Mysticetus, and those of the smaller, somewhat similar whale, Balæna Australis. The Right or Greenland whale had very long bone, up to eleven feet. To cover the whalebone, the lower lip is formed as in this jotting. Scoresby maintains that when the Right whale’s mouth is closed, the blades bend or fold back towards the throat. This seems probable.

A Finner’s Head

A Right Whale’s Head

You see from the difference between these whales’ points that the rorqual is a more athletic beast than the Right whale.

Right Whales and Sperm up to 60 Feet, Finners up to 110 Feet

1. Greenland Right whale, Balæna Mysticetus, up to 60 feet in length, generally found near Arctic ice. The smaller whalebone whale of the Atlantic and Southern oceans is somewhat similar in shape; it runs to 50 feet; shows tail as it dives; has no fin on back. It is called the Nordcapper or Biscayensis and Australis.

2. The Sperm or Cachalot, Physeter Macrocephalus. A toothed whale 50 to 60 feet; shows tail when it dives; sometimes breaches, i.e. leaps several times in succession as it travels; blast low and projected forward.

3. Seihvale, Balænoptera Borealis, 40 to 50 feet; blast about 10 feet; does not usually lift tail out of water before final dive; has fin on back, is therefore a “finner.”

4. Fin whale, Balænoptera Musculus, up to 75 feet. The Blue whale, Balænoptera Sibbaldii, is similar, with smaller fin on back; both make blasts about 18 feet. The Blue whale in Southern seas has been killed up to 110 feet.

The sperm or cachalot whale’s head is very peculiar. It has teeth in lower jaw and a small tongue. All the part forward of the dotted line here, which represents the skull of the head, is a mass of fibrous oil. When you cut through the skin you can bail it out with pitchers or pump it out till it gets too cold, after which you do not know whether to lift it in your hands or in a bucket. It is beautifully clear, no one knows why it has this extraordinary spongy forepart to its head. This sperm oil is chemically different from the oil of other whales; it is more of the nature of a wax: the other whales are of a fatty nature. It makes the finest lubricant for modern machinery.

Head of a Sperm, showing Skull

The blow hole is on left side of this “case,” the blow pipe from lungs going through it. And the jet of steam is thrown up two or three feet and forward, so a sperm’s blast is easily distinguished from that of the finner, which is bigger and straight up, say to twenty or thirty feet, or possibly forty feet, in the case of a large Blue whale.