Whaling served to train a hardy and courageous generation of sailors the like of which can nowhere be found today. They braved the perils of icy seas in scurvy-ridden ships, and when fortune favored brought to port full cargoes of “bone” and oil, which well repaid the hardships endured in their capture. Many a ship and crew sailed into the North in pursuit of these habitants of the icy sea never to return.
Interest in the brave and romantic life of the whalers still exists, though the most picturesque quality of their calling passed with the advent of steam whalers and the “bomb gun,” which shoots an explosive charge into the whale and kills it without the exciting struggle which once attended such a capture by open boats.
It has been well said that no people ever advanced in the scale of civilization without the use of some artificial illuminant at night. The world owes a great debt to the right whale and its relatives for their contribution to the “midnight oil,” which encouraged learning through the centuries preceding the discovery of mineral oil. It also furnished the whalebone which built up the “stays” so dear to the hearts of our great-grandmothers.
The female right whale has a single young, which she suckles and keeps with her for about a year. She shows much maternal affection, and a number of cases are recorded in which the mother persisted in trying to release her young after it had been harpooned and killed.
Every year, as the pack ice breaks up for the season, the bowheads move north through Bering Straits. As late as 1881 Eskimos along the Arctic coast of Alaska put to sea in walrus-hide umiaks, armed with primitive bone-pointed spears, seal-skin floats, and flint-pointed lances for the capture of these huge beasts. These fearless sea hunters, with their equipment handed down from the Stone Age, were sufficiently successful in their chase to cause trading schooners to make a practice of visiting the villages along the coast to buy their whalebone.
From one of the whaling ships encountered north of Bering Straits the summer of 1881 we secured a harpoon, taken from a bowhead in those waters, bearing a private mark which proved that it came from a whaling ship on the Greenland coast, thus showing conclusively that these whales in their wanderings make the “Northwest Passage.”
Persistent hunting through the centuries has vastly decreased whales of all valued species, and the modern steam whaler is hastening their end. Their only hope of survival lies in wise international action, and it is urgent that this be secured in time.
KILLER WHALE
