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.
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.