The sperm is very playful and like the humpback frequently “breaches,” or throws itself out of water, shooting into the air at an angle of about 45 degrees and falling back upon its side. It sometimes lobtails also, pounding the water into spray with its flukes. When a sperm is harpooned with a hand iron it often rolls over and over on the surface, winding the line about its body and causing the hunters a deal of trouble.
The tongue of a sperm whale; it is strikingly different from the enormous flabby tongue of the whalebone whales.
Along the Japanese coast during July the sperm whales sometimes appear in enormous herds of four hundred or more; the great animals will lie at the surface spouting continually and the sea for half a mile will be alive with whales.
When the steam whalers find a school of this sort, signals are set to bring in all the ships which may be near, and there is excitement enough for everyone. The guns bang as often as they can be loaded and the whales made fast, and the number killed is merely a question of how many harpoons each ship carries, or the hours of daylight left when the herd is found.
The head of the sixty-foot sperm whale, the skeleton of which was sent to the American Museum of Natural History, from Japan. The “case” yielded 20 barrels of spermaceti.
The school will usually move very slowly, blowing and wallowing along at the surface, and the animals in the center are heedless of the slaughter on the outskirts of the herd. At times, however, the whales will stampede at the first gun, and it then becomes a stern chase, which is often a long one, before a ship can get fast.
At Aikawa, one day, a whale ship with a Japanese gunner raised a herd of sperms a long way from the village. The man allowed his greed to get the better of his judgment and killed ten whales. He made them all fast to the ship, which could barely move her load through the water, and it was not until three days later that she arrived at the station. The whales had all “blasted,” or decomposed, and were not as valuable commercially as a single fresh one would have been.
The meat of this species is so dark and full of oil that it is of but little use as food. Nevertheless, during the summer it is sold to the native coal miners of Japan who live in such extreme poverty that they are glad to get even such meat at two or three sen per pound.