Almost at once the winch began to take in the slack and haul the carcass to the surface. When it came alongside the rope attached to the first harpoon floated backward in dangerous proximity to the propeller, and it required some careful work to get the animal fast to the bow and the line safely out of the way.
We had a long tow to the station, for the chase had carried us nearly one hundred and thirty miles away, and not until the next afternoon did the sturdy little vessel sweep into the bay and deliver her whale to the station where in a very few hours its flesh would fill thousands of waiting cans and be sent to the markets throughout the Empire.
CHAPTER XI
THE LARGEST ANIMAL THAT EVER LIVED
The blue whale is not only the largest animal that lives today upon the earth or in its waters, but, so far as is known, it is the largest animal that has ever lived. Even those giant extinct reptiles, the dinosaurs, which splashed along the borders of the inland seas of Wyoming and Montana 3,000,000 years ago, could not approach a blue whale either in length or weight.
In 1903, Dr. F. A. Lucas weighed in sections a blue whale taken at Newfoundland. The animal was 78 feet long and 35 feet around the shoulders; the head was 19 feet in length and the flukes 16 feet from tip to tip. The total weight was 63 tons; the flesh weighed 40 tons, the blubber 8 tons, the blood, viscera, and baleen 7 tons, and the bones 8 tons. So far as I am aware this is the only specimen which has ever been actually weighed.
Exaggerated accounts of the size of this species are current even in reputable books on natural history, but the largest specimen which has yet been actually measured and recorded is one 87 feet long, stranded a few years ago upon the coast of New Zealand; this animal must have weighed at least 75 tons. I have measured two blue whales 85 feet long but individuals of this size are rare.
A blue whale at Aikawa, Japan. “The largest specimen which has yet been actually measured and recorded is one 87 feet long, stranded a few years ago upon the coast of New Zealand; this animal must have weighed at least 75 tons.”
All the gunners who have hunted in the South Atlantic or Pacific tell remarkable tales of the enormous blue whales killed off Kerguelen and South Georgia Islands. I have no doubt that this species reaches 90 or possibly 95 feet, but the stories of 115- and 120-foot whales are certainly myths. As Dr. Lucas aptly says, “All whales shrink under the tape measure.”
