Some years ago, when an invalid wrote to Mark Twain seeking advice as to the value of fish as “brain food,” the answer of that humourist was plain indeed:—“Fish-food is good: abounds in phosphorus and nutrition. In your case I must recommend a small whale!” Unfortunately, Mark Twain fell into a very common error. The whale is not a fish; it is a mammal: it suckles its young. The writer has eaten whale—that is, a little bit of one. Whale brain, enclosed in batter, and treated as a fritter, is not to be despised.
The British whaler of about 1670 is quaintly described by Frederic Martin, who visited Spitzbergen and Greenland that year. He says:—“Whoever of the ships’ crews sees a dead whale cries out, ‘Fish mine!’ and therefore the merchants must pay him a ducat for his care and vigilance. Many of them climb often into the mast in hopes to have a ducat, but in vain. When the dead whale is thus fastened to the ship, two sloops hold on the other side of the fish, or whale, and in each of them doth stand a man or boy that has a long hook in his hands, wherewith he doth hold the boat to the ship, and the harpooner stands before in the sloop or upon the whale, with a leathern suit on, and sometimes they have boots on. Underneath the hook are some sharp nails fixed, that they may be able to stand firm. These two men that cut the fat off have their peculiar wages for it, viz., about four or five rix dollars. First they cut a large piece from behind the head, by the eyes, which they call the kenter-piece, that is as much as to say, the winding-piece; for as they cut all the other fat all in rows from the whale towards the end, so they cut this great kenter-piece larger and wider than all the rest. This piece, when it is cut round about from the whale, reaches from the water to the cradle (that is, the round circle that goes round about the middle of the mast, and is made in the shape of a basket), whence you may guess of the bigness of a whale. A strong and thick rope is fixed to this kenter-piece, and the other end is fixed to underneath the cradle, whereby the whale is as it were borne up out of the water, that they may come at it, and by reason of the great weight of the whale the ship leans towards that side. One may judge how tough the fat is, for in this piece a hole is made, through which the rope is fastened, yet not deep into the fat, wherewith they turn the fish at pleasure. Then they cut another piece down hard by this, which is also hauled up into the ship, where it is cut into pieces a foot square. The knives used are, with their hafts, about the length of a man,” and so on.
Mr. Brierly tells us that the most important natural enemy of the whale on the coast of Australia is the “killer,” a kind of large porpoise, with a blunt head and large teeth. These [pg 180]“killers” often attack the whale, and worry it like a pack of dogs, and sometimes kill it. The whalemen regard these creatures as important allies, for when they see from the look-out that a whale has been “hove-to” by them they are pretty sure of capturing it. The killers show no fear of the boats, but will attack the whale at the same time; and if a boat is stove in, which often happens, they will not hurt the men when in the water. The Australian natives about Twofold Bay say the killers are the spirits of their own people, and when they see them will pretend to point out particular individuals they have known. Some are very large, exceeding twenty-five feet; they blow from the head, in the same manner as the whale.
The homes of whales are hardly known. Where the northern whale breeds has long been a puzzling question among whalemen. It is a cold-water animal. Maury asks:—“Is the nursery for the great whale in the Polar Sea, which has been so set about and hemmed in with a ledge of ice that man may not trespass there? This providential economy still further prompts the question, Whence comes all the food for the young whales there? Do the teeming whalers of the Gulf Stream convey it there also, in channels so far in the depths of the sea that no enemy may waylay and spoil it in the long journey? It may generally be believed that the northern whale, which is now confined to the Polar Sea, descended annually into the temperate region of the Atlantic, as far as the Bay of Biscay, and that it was only the persecution of the whale-fishers which compelled it to seek its frozen retreat. This opinion is now shown to be erroneous, and to have rested only on the confounding of two distinct species of whale. Like other whales, the northern is migratory, and changes its quarters according to the seasons; and the systematic registers of the Danish colonists of Greenland show that often the same individual appears at the same epoch in the same fiord. The females of the southern whale visit the coasts of the Cape in June to bring forth their young, and return to the high seas in August or September. It was supposed that the migration of the northern whale was for a similar purpose. This, however, is not now considered to be the case. Its movements are attributed to climatal changes alone, and especially to the transport of ice into Baffin’s Bay. It lives entirely in the midst of glaciers, and therefore is found in the south during winter and in the north during summer. The whale-fishery has diminished its numbers, but not altered its mode of life. It is stated now that the whale believed to have visited the North Atlantic Ocean is a totally different species, a much more violent and dangerous animal than the northern whale, also smaller, and less rich in oil. The fishery for the latter ceased towards the end of the last century, but it is thought to be not wholly extinct. On September 17th, 1854, a whale, with its little one, appeared before St. Sebastian, in the Bay of Biscay; the mother [pg 181]escaped, but the young one was taken, and from a drawing of a skeleton of the latter MM. Eschricht and Rheinhardt, of Copenhagen, are convinced that it belonged to a species distinct from the Greenland whale; so that the name of ‘Mysticete’ has been applied to various whales.”
THE NORTHERN WHALE (Balina mysticetus).
The sperm whale, says Maury, is a warm water animal; the right whale delights in cold water. The log-books of the American whalers show that the torrid zone is to the right whale as a sea of fire, through which it cannot pass; and that the right whale of the northern hemisphere and that of the southern are two different animals; and that the sperm whale has never been known to double the Cape of Good Hope—he doubles Cape Horn.
Mr. Beale has done more to elucidate the habits and form of this whale than any other writer. Its great peculiarity of form is the head, presenting a very thick, blunt extremity, about a third of the whole length of the animal. The head, viewed in front, has a broad, flattened surface, rounded and contracted above, considerably expanded on the sides, and gradually contracted below, resembling in some degree the cut-water of a ship. On the right [pg 182]side of the nose is a cavity for secreting and containing an oily fluid, which after death concretes into the substance called spermaceti, of which in a large whale there is not unfrequently a ton. The mouth extends nearly the whole length of the head, and the throat is capacious enough to give passage to the body of a man, presenting a strong contrast to the contracted gullet of the Greenland whale. Immediately beneath the black skin of the sperm whale is the blubber, or fat, termed “the blanket,” of a light yellowish colour, producing when melted the sperm oil. A specimen taken in 1829 near Whitstable measured sixty-two feet in length. The oil was worth £320, exclusive of the spermaceti.[49] Many years since the Samuel Enderby, whaler, returned from the south with a cargo of sperm oil worth £40,000.
CUTTING UP THE WHALE.