The morning following the hunt the cutting in begins, each crew or group of villages taking, without bickering or protestation, the whales apportioned to them by the sheriff. After the blubber has been removed, the meat is carefully cut away from the skeleton, piled in neat heaps, and carried away by the women in wooden creels to their homes. All that remains to mark the scene of carnage is the white skeletons bleaching in the sun.
But blackfish are not of use to the Faroe Islanders alone, for wherever one of the old-time whaling vessels cruises for sperm whales, the green crews and gear are tried out if a school is found. And throughout the voyage when whales are scarce, few of the vessels are above “lowering” for a herd of these huge porpoises.
The common blackfish of the North Atlantic is without a trace of color above, but has a narrow line of white on the breast and belly, which widens into a fountain-jet shape on the throat. The species found on the American Atlantic coast south of New York (G. brachypterus) is black everywhere upon its body, like the blackfish of the Pacific (G. scammoni). Twenty-four feet seems to be about the maximum size of this porpoise, which in the entire family is exceeded in length only by the killer whale.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE PASSING OF THE WHALE
The world hunt for the whale began a thousand years ago in the Bay of Biscay and it bids fair to end ere the close of the twentieth century.
After the extermination of the North Atlantic right whale on the coast of Spain, the hunters pushed northward to Finland and Iceland, and it is even possible that whalers visited Newfoundland long before Columbus saw American shores.
The relentless warfare to which the right whale was subjected for hundreds of years culminated in the sixteenth century, and only stopped short of actual extermination through the discovery, in the far north, of its larger and more valuable relative, the bowhead. Then the right whale dropped from sight, supposedly being extinct, and although it appeared again a hundred years later, it has never recovered from the effects of its early persecution.
The capture of the bowhead began in 1612 in the open waters between Spitzbergen and Greenland, and soon extended to Davis Strait and Baffin Bay. After two hundred years of unceasing pursuit this whale was driven to the remotest parts of the Arctic Ocean and was so nearly exterminated that now, when northern whaling has practically ended, its recovery in numbers is exceedingly doubtful.
All this happened before the modern harpoon-gun diverted attention to the fin whales which during the last half-century have been so ruthlessly butchered by means of every invention at man’s disposal that their commercial extinction is inevitable within a very few decades if the slaughter is continued unchecked.
By commercial extinction I mean decrease in the number of whales to the point when their pursuit will no longer be profitable. While this may not mean total extermination because of the great expense connected with the modern methods of capture and handling the carcasses, yet the whales will have been so reduced in numbers that they can never again become abundant. Enormous and highly specialized animals are usually slow breeders and especially liable to extinction, and since it has taken millions of years to evolve the whale, it is extremely unlikely that such evolution can again be duplicated upon this planet.