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.