Yet with a magnificent courage which is only half appreciated by a landsman, the fearless New Bedford whalers attack these colossal animals with merely a slender hand lance. Is it to be wondered at that our New England ancestors in such a training school made a history of which every American may well be proud?
A female sperm whale at Aikawa, Japan. The head of the female is much more pointed than that of the male.
Although deep-sea whaling is practically ended, year after year two or three ships drop away from the New Bedford wharves bound for the Hatteras grounds for sperm whales. The cruises are short—only six or seven months—and the whales are killed, cut in, and tried out at sea in the old-time way. But even this lacks much of the glamour and romance of the old days, when sons of New Bedford’s best families manned the boats, for now the crews are usually “Brava” negroes from the Kay Verde Islands, and the only white men in the ship’s company are the Captain and perhaps one or two of the Mates.
The excitement of the hunt is still there, however, and it takes the same nerve and the same cool head to fasten to and lance a sperm, as it did fifty years ago. I have had no personal experience in this kind of whaling, and therefore it does not fall within the scope of this book, but by way of contrast I have quoted a few extracts from the “Diary of a Whaling Cruise” by Victor Slocum, Harpooner.[[14]]
[14]. Forest and Stream, Vol. 67, 1907, pp. 928, 930, 968.
When a whale is cut in at sea the carcass is made fast to the lee side of the ship, and a skeleton platform of heavy planks is rigged to project beyond the whale, just above the surface. The mates take their places there and, with long “whale spades,” make incisions through the blubber, which is stripped off in long blanket pieces by means of a block and tackle suspended from the mast. When the blubber is all in, the head is cut away and hauled on board, where the case is bailed, then the chains are slacked and the great carcass sinks into the green depths below to furnish food for thousands of hungry sharks.
Mr. Slocum tells of a sperm whale hunt in the following words:
At 4 A. M. all hands started to cut in, and just as we got through heaving, it was whales again—just after dinner. I was glad of that, and so was everybody else, for the work and exposure was beginning to pull on us, and a full stomach is none too good to go down in a boat with. The whales were close by, and a large school of them, too. There was just a breath of air stirring, so up went the sail and we paddled as noiselessly as aborigines upon our quarry.
There seemed to be whales everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, and all tame—just rolling and snorting in the water they lay in; once in a while one would jump like a trout and make a splash like a waterfall, just to amuse himself.