Within recent years, on other shores but this one, an innovation has entered the whaling business. The modern plan is to have shore-refineries and from these strategic bases to send out strongly-built high-speed steamers to shoot detonating harpoons from a cannon into the whale. Such methods are pursued with profit on Newfoundland and Vancouver Island shores. The gun-harpoon, the invention of Sven Foyn, a Norwegian, is furnished at the point with a contrivance which, as it enters the whale, opens out anchor-like flukes which clutch his vitals. Connected by a line to the whaling-steamer, the harpoon holds the quarry until the whaler steams alongside, when the "fish" is soon dispatched. A nozzle is attached to the harpoon-wound, and hot air from the engine pumped into the "proposition" keeps it afloat. The Vancouver Island station has bagged as many as five whales in one day,—Cachalots, Humpbacks, and Sulphur-Bottoms.
The Eskimo say, "There is no part of a seal that is not good," and the same applies to whales. Blubber and bone have their regular markets. The viscera, scraps of fat and oddments tried out in fiery furnaces, appear in the form of pungent snuff-like powder, a much-sought fertiliser. From the Vancouver Island stations it goes across to enrich the cane-fields of Honolulu and the rose-gardens of Nippon. The Japs are eager customers for the dried or smoked whale-meat; and whale-steak broiled to a turn can scarcely be distinguished from choice porterhouse, since it is absolutely free from fishy taste. Far back in the fourteenth century the Biscayans made whale-venison their staple, and Norway to-day has more than one establishment which turns out canned whale. Newfoundlanders find whale-meat a welcome change from cod perpetual, and I have seen the Indians of Cape Flattery eat it when it hailed you a mile to windward and had more than begun to twine like a giddy honeysuckle. Now, enterprising people are talking of canning whales' milk, a dense yellow fluid like soft tallow. When the milk-maid goes out to milk a whale she must take half a dozen barrels along as milking pails. The Eskimo like it. Soon the soda-fountains on Fort Macpherson and Herschel Island will bear the legend, "Whale cream soda" and "Best Whale Milkshake."
To have an even superficial knowledge of the commercial products of the whale, one must learn of baleen, of whale-oils and spermaceti, of ambergris, whale-guano, whale-ivory, and whale-leather.
What do we do with baleen? It so combines lightness, elasticity, and flexibility, that nothing yet invented adapts itself so perfectly to all the requirements of the fashionable corset. Whalebone whips are made from single pieces of baleen seven or eight feet long. A whalebone horsewhip costs from fifteen to eighteen dollars and will outlast a dozen cheaper persuaders. The Sairy Gamp umbrella of the last generation, which boasted whalebone ribs, never "broke its mighty heart" in a rainstorm (and incidentally could never be shut up tight). Flexible steel has taken the place of whalebone in many of the arts; but new avenues of usefulness open up to baleen. Out of it artificial feathers of exquisite lightness and wigs or toupees are made. Shredded into fine filaments, baleen is now woven in with the other fibres in the manufacture of the finest French silks, imparting resilience and elasticity to the rich material. A Chicago paper of the date of this writing advertises:
WHALEBONE TEETH $5
A GREAT DISCOVERY
THE NEW WHALEBONE PLATE WHICH IS THE LIGHTEST
AND STRONGEST SET KNOWN
DOES NOT COVER THE ROOF OF THE MOUTH
Guaranteed ten years