An eighty-two foot blue whale at Vancouver Island. The mouth is about nineteen feet in length, and the outer edges of the baleen plates are well shown.
Undoubtedly the principal reason why whales are able to attain such an enormous size is because their bodies are supported by the water in which they live. A bird is limited to the weight which its wings can bear up in the air. A land animal, if it becomes too large, cannot hold its body off the ground or move about readily and is doomed to certain destruction. But a whale has to face none of these problems and can grow without restraint. The sperm and right whales float when killed, but the fin whales usually sink although the specific gravity of their bodies is but little more than that of water.
Because whales live in a supporting medium their young are of enormous size at birth, in some instances the calf being almost half the length of its mother. I once took from an 80-foot blue whale a 25-foot baby which weighed about 8 tons. The calf was just ready for birth and was fully formed, the whalebone being about three inches long.
At Aikawa a sperm whale 32 feet in length contained a fœtus 14 feet, 8 inches long, and in Alaska while a 65-foot finback whale was being drawn out of the water upon the slip she gave birth to a 22-foot baby, which, of course, was dead.
Not long ago I read an account of a happy event of this sort which was said to have occurred on the Labrador coast, where the baby whale flopped off into the water and swam away. This was, of course, not true, for the fœtus would die with its mother, but when such stories once find their way into print they are difficult to stop.
The wonderful strength of the blue whale is almost beyond belief, and I have listened to many stories from Norwegians which I would not dare repeat here although personally I believe them to be true. J. G. Millais, Esq., has given an interesting account of a blue whale hunt, which I am quoting in full since it shows, in some degree, of what this magnificent animal is capable:
The open mouth of a blue whale. Ten or twelve men could stand in the mouth, but the throat is only eight inches in diameter.
The most remarkable and protracted hunt on record after a Whale was experienced by the steamer Puma in 1903. The most exaggerated accounts of this appeared in the American and English papers, where the journalists went so far as to say that the Whale had towed the ship from Newfoundland to Labrador, and other wild statements. The following particulars were given by Hans Johanessen, mate of the Puma, so they are, at any rate, first hand.
The Puma spied and “struck” a large Blue Whale six miles from Placentia at nine o’clock in the morning. The animal immediately became “wild,” and it was found impossible to get near enough to fire another harpoon into it. For the entire day it towed the steamer, with engines at half speed astern, at a rate of six knots. Toward evening a second rope was made fast to the stern of the vessel and attached to the first line, now “out” about one mile. The steamer then put on full speed ahead. This seemed to incense the Whale, which put forth all its strength and dragged the whole of the after part of the vessel under water, flooding the after cabin and part of the engine room. The stern rope was immediately cut with an ax and the danger averted.