When on hunting trips in early autumn, I camped many times on the banks of narrow tide channels leading through the coastal tundra, and for hours during the darkness of night, as the tide was rising, heard the deep-sighing sound of their blowing, as schools of belugas fished up and down the current, often only 15 or 20 feet from where I lay.
The oil and flesh of the white whale is highly prized by the Eskimos, and they not only pursue it in kyaks with harpoon and float, but set large-meshed nets of strong seal-skin cords off projecting points near entrances to bays. Young or medium-sized animals are often caught in this manner, but powerful adults often tear the nets to fragments.
The beluga frequents broken pack ice along shore, and one trapped alive by the closing ice north of the Yukon early one winter was reported by the Eskimos to have uttered curious squeaking noises when they attacked and killed it—an interesting fact, as the beluga is said to be the only member of the whale family to make vocal sounds of any kind.
When a school has its curiosity aroused by the approach of a boat or for any other cause, the members often raise their heads well out of water, one after the other, and take a deliberate look, then dive and swim to a safe distance before coming up again.
The small size of the beluga has long saved it from organized pursuit. Recently it has been announced that its skin has become valuable for commercial purposes, and that many are being killed. If this continues, these harmless and interesting animals are likely soon to disappear from most of their present haunts, unless proper measures can be taken to protect them from undue killing.
GREENLAND RIGHT WHALE, OR BOWHEAD (Balæna mysticetus)
The Greenland right whale is one of the largest of sea mammals, reaching a length of from 50 to 60 feet, and has a marvelously specialized development. Its enormous head comprises about one-third of the total length, with a gigantic mouth provided with about 400 long, narrow plates of baleen, or whalebone, attached at one end and hanging in overlapping series from the roof of the mouth. These thin plates of baleen rarely exceed a foot in width and are from 2 to over 10 feet long. One edge and the free end of each plate is bordered with a stiff hairlike fringe.
The northern seas frequented by these whales swarm with small, almost microscopic, crustaceans and other minute pelagic life, which is commonly so abundant that great areas of the ocean are tinged by them to a deep brown. These gatherings of small animal life are called “brit” by the whalers and furnish the food supply of the bowhead. The whale swims slowly through the sea with its mouth open, straining the water through the fringed whalebone plates on each side of its mouth, thus retaining on its enormous fleshy tongue a mass of “brit,” which is swallowed through a gullet extraordinarily small in comparison with the size of the mouth. Among all the animal life on the earth there is not a more perfectly developed apparatus provided for feeding on highly specialized food than that possessed by the right whale—one of the hugest of beasts and feeding on some of the smallest of animals, untold numbers of which are required for a single mouthful.
The bowhead is a circumpolar species, which in summer frequents the Arctic ice pack and its borders, and on the approach of winter migrates to a more-southerly latitude. For centuries this huge mammal has formed the main basis for the whaling industry in far northern waters, first in the Greenland seas and later through Bering Straits into the Arctic basin north of the shores of Siberia and Alaska.
Each large whale is a prize worth winning, since it may yield as much as 200 barrels of oil and several thousand pounds of whalebone. All know of the rise and fall of the whaling business, on which many fortunes were built and on which depended the prosperity of several New England towns.