Captain Melsom tells me that while hunting a pair of devilfish near Ulsan he shot the female, and the male would not leave his dead consort, keeping close alongside and pushing his head over her body. Later he struck the male with a harpoon, but did not get fast, and even then it returned and was finally killed.
Captain Melsom about to lance a gray whale from the pram.
Scammon says that when attacked in the lagoons with their young the devilfish would turn furiously upon the boats, and that almost every day injuries to the crews were reported. He gives an interesting account of two gray whales which, in February, 1856, were found aground in Magdalena Bay:
Each had a calf playing about, there being sufficient depth for the young ones, while the mothers were lying hard on the bottom. When attacked, the smaller of the two old whales lay motionless, and the boat approached near enough to “set” the hand lance into her “life,” dispatching the animal at a single dart. The other, when approached, would raise her head and flukes above the water, supporting herself on a small portion of the belly, turning easily and heading toward the boat, which made it very difficult to capture her.
It appears to be their habit to get into the shallowest inland waters when their cubs are young. For this reason the whaling ships anchor at a considerable distance from where the crews go to hunt the animals, and several vessels are often in the same lagoon.[[10]]
[10]. (l. c., p. 25.)
The whalemen in Korea, where the hunting is done from small steamships by the Norwegian method, do not regard the animals as especially dangerous. They seldom lance one from the pram, as is frequently done with other whales, because the devilfish seem to be very sensitive to pain and as soon as the iron penetrates the body the animal will raise itself in the water, throwing its head from side to side and sometimes lashing about with its flukes and flippers.
Probably if the gray whales were hunted on their breeding grounds about the southern end of Korea, they would be found to be dangerous even to the vessels themselves, but I doubt if more so than other species under similar conditions.
Most whales are subject to diseases of various kinds and the devilfish is no exception. One specimen was brought to the station at Ulsan with all the flesh on the left side of the head badly decomposed and in some places entirely gone, leaving the bone exposed; what remained hung in a soft, green evil-smelling mass. The whale had evidently suffered considerably from the disease, for it was very thin and the blubber was dry.