Cutting in a gray whale. The head is lying on the wharf and two Koreans are standing beside it. They wear long white coats, enormous baggy trousers and a horsehair hat.
It did not take long to issue an edict against all Koreans in reference to my whale, but the matter did not end there. The pile of toothsome bones was too great a temptation and whenever I happened to be out of sight some white-gowned native was sure to steal up and leave with a bone under his coat.
I finally discovered a very effective, and I think highly original, way to stop the stealing. In my equipment there was a 22-caliber rifle and several hundred B. B. caps, the bullets from which would just about penetrate the thick, wadded trousers of a Korean.
“When the winch began slowly to lift the huge black body out of the water, a very short examination told me that the koku kujira really was the long-lost gray whale.”
I made a hole in the shojo, the paper screen of the Japanese house where I was living, and sat down to watch. In a short time a Korean stole up to the pile of bones and bent over to pick out one which he could carry. I drew a fine bead on the lower portion of his anatomy and when the rifle cracked the native made a jump which would have brought him fame and fortune could it have been duplicated at the New York Hippodrome. It is hardly necessary to say that he dropped the bone. In a very short time every Korean in the village knew that a visit to that skeleton generally entailed difficulty in sitting down for several days afterward and the whale was left unmolested.
On the day of my arrival at Ulsan the four whaling ships which hunted from the station were all lying in the harbor, for the gale had made cruising outside impossible. As soon as we landed I met my friend, Captain H. G. Melsom of the S. S. Main, one of the best gunners who has ever hunted in the East. Captain Melsom was the first man to learn how to take the devilfish in Korean waters, because for many years the habit of the animals of keeping close inshore among the rocks baffled the whalers. He learned how to trick the clever whales and hang about just outside the breakers ready for a shot when they rose to blow. From Captain Melsom I learned much of the devilfish lore and many evenings on his ship, the Main, did I listen to his stories of whales and their ways.
I shall never forget the intense interest with which I waited for my first sight of a gray whale. On the next day after my arrival at Ulsan I had started across the bay in a sampan to have a look at the village with Mr. Matsumoto, the station paymaster. We had hardly left the shore, when the siren whistle of a whale ship sounded far down the bay and soon the vessel swept around the point into view. At the port bow hung the dark flukes of a whale, the sight of which made me breathe hard with excitement, for one of two things must happen—either I was to find that here was an entirely new species, or else was to rediscover one which had been lost to science for thirty years. Either prospect was alluring enough and as the vessel slowly swung in toward the wharf and a pair of great flukes, the like of which I had never seen before, waved in front of me, I realized that here at last was what I had come half around the world to see.
When the winch began slowly to lift the huge black body out of the water, a very short examination told me that the koku kujira really was the long-lost gray whale and not a species new to science. But it was not the gray whale of Scammon’s description, for this white-circled, gray-washed body was very little like the figure he had published in his book, “The Marine Mammalia.”