As soon as a whale is sighted, two or three small boats are lowered and each endeavors to be the first to reach the animal. The bowhead’s blowholes are situated on the summit of a prominent bunch and immediately behind them is a deep concavity over the base of the skull, and the “neck.” When the whale lies at the surface only the blowholes and back show above water, and the attacking boat, coming from behind, endeavors to sail directly over the submerged neck. As the boat crosses the whale, the harpooner thrusts a hand bomb-iron into the body; the bomb explodes and plows its way into the backbone, often killing the animal almost instantly.
Stripping the blubber from the large right whale at Amagansett. This specimen was fifty-four feet long and the largest that has yet been scientifically recorded.
The most difficult part of the work is to approach so noiselessly that the boat can cross the neck and place the bomb harpoon properly. If the whale is not killed at once it will usually run at considerable speed and, perhaps, dive under an ice-floe, in which case, if the boat does not carry sufficient line, the rope must be cut or certain destruction follows.
As far back as tradition goes, the Eskimos of northern Alaska have been a race of mighty hunters and whalemen. At the largest villages, near every cape and headland, the passing of the dark days of winter marked the preparations for the great “devil dance,” the invariable prelude to the spring whale hunt. About April 1, all the able-bodied men of the village would build across the ice to the water a road over which they might haul their boats and sleds. Their gear, consisting of a few fathoms of walrus-hide line fitted with sealskin bladders and tied to a short flint-headed spear, was primitive enough, but effective.
On the appearance of a bowhead all the boats took up a position in some comfortable nook along the edge of the ice-floe. When the whale came near a boat, the head man, whose place was usually in the stern, turned the canoe head-on toward the ice and sang the great death song, handed down from some famous whale-killing ancestor. This consumed fifteen or twenty minutes and then the harpooner thrust his flint-headed spear into the whale, doing little except frighten it nearly to death.
As it passed the next canoe the same performance, without the song, was repeated, continuing until the number of skin pokes made it impossible for the whale to dive. Then the natives paddled up to finish the animal with their flint-headed killing lances.
When the whale was dead a slip, or runway, had to be cut to the edge of the water and the carcass secured by walrus-hide lines passed round a rude windlass constructed of a rounded cake of ice and a piece of driftwood. Then the huge body could be hoisted up, or, if the edge of the ice was too rough, cut in while rolling over and over in the water. The meat, blubber, “black skin,” and bone were equally divided and sent ashore on sleds, where they could be dressed and prepared for the winter.
The Amagansett whale covered with ice after the blubber had been stripped off the carcass.