Whale hunting with gun and camera / A naturalist's account of the modern shore-whaling industry, of whales and their habits, and of hunting experiences in various parts of the world

by Roy Chapman Andrews

The Siwash Indians along the coast awaited the coming of this whale with the same eagerness with which the Egyptians hail the rising of the Nile, for to them it meant a time of feasting and of “potlatch.” In their frail dug-out canoes they hung about the kelp fields, sending harpoon after harpoon into its great gray body as the animal rose to breathe, until it finally turned belly up and sank. It was a matter of only a day or so then before the barnacle-studded carcass, distended with the gases of decomposition, floated to the surface and was towed to the beach by the watchful natives.

As the years went by, however, the whales became more wary, fewer and fewer coming into the kelp fields, until finally they ceased altogether and passed up and down the coast on their annual migrations far out at sea where they were safe from the deadly harpoons of the hunters.

But the whales, for all their astuteness, were not free from persecution. During the winter, when they came into the shallow water of the California lagoons to bring forth their young, the American whaling ships came also, and the animals, held by mother love, were killed by hundreds.

However, they were not always slaughtered without making a fight to save their babies, and because they frequently wrecked the boats and killed the crews they gained the title of “devilfish,” and as such are generally known throughout the Pacific rather than by the more formal name of California gray whale, which was bestowed upon them in 1868 by Professor Cope.

The American fishery did not last long for continual slaughter on their breeding grounds soon so depleted the numbers of the gray whales that the hunt was no longer profitable, and the shore stations which had been established at various points along the coast finally ceased operations altogether. For over twenty years the species had been lost to science and naturalists believed it to be extinct.

In 1910, while in Japan, I learned from the whaling company of the existence of an animal known as the koku kujira, or “devilfish,” which formed the basis of their winter fishery upon the southeastern coast of Korea.

The side view of a model of a gray whale in the American Museum of Natural History prepared under the direction of the author from studies made in Korea.

A ventral view of the gray whale model. Note the three furrows in the throat.