The temperature was +12°, and, to add to our difficulties, on the second day a terrific storm almost buried the carcass in sand so that it was necessary to build a breakwater of flesh against the surf, and laboriously dig out the skeleton bone by bone.
The Amagansett whale was an old female, fifty-four feet long, and proved to be the largest specimen which had then been recorded. On the same day that it was captured, a smaller thirty-eight-foot whale, evidently the calf of the first, was killed at Wainscott, Long Island. This skeleton was also secured, and was eventually sent to London, while the Amagansett whale with its baleen remains in the Museum to be mounted in the Hall of Water Mammals. Just a year later another right whale, a twenty-eight-foot calf, was killed at Amagansett, but its carcass was lost in a storm.
The baleen of a right whale. This specimen had whalebone eight feet long.
As yet it is impossible to say with authority just how many species of right whales exist. Some years ago Lieutenant Maury, after studying the daily logs of hundreds of whaling vessels, prepared a chart which appears to show that the animals do not cross the belt of tropical water at the Equator, and that the right whales of the northern and southern hemispheres are thus definitely separated. Acting upon the supposition that since there could be no communication between them these whales must certainly have become differentiated enough to form distinct species, each has been given a scientific name.
In the light of present knowledge, however, this apparent separation cannot be considered sufficient ground for dividing the right whales into northern and southern species, unless a critical comparison of their external and internal anatomy reveals constant differences.
CHAPTER XXII
THE BOTTLENOSE WHALE AND HOW IT IS HUNTED
There is a strange and interesting family of small-toothed whales known as the ziphioids, which owes its commercial importance to a single species, the bottlenose. This whale seldom reaches a greater length than thirty feet, and takes its name from the bottle-like snout or beak which, at the extreme tip of the lower jaw, bears two small pointed teeth almost concealed in the gum.
These whales were never extensively hunted until 1882, when Captain David Gray went north in the schooner Eclipse and returned with a cargo of oil which demonstrated the profits of the venture. The next year he got two hundred bottlenoses and it was not long before the Norwegians began operations on a large scale. In 1891, from Norway alone, seventy ships sailed for bottlenoses and killed a total of three thousand animals. In later years the business declined because of the scarcity of whales and the difficulties and dangers of the hunt, for in no branch of modern whaling is there such a large percentage of fatal accidents.
The bottlenose ships are small schooners of thirty to fifty tons, carrying several small boats and usually armed with six guns fore and aft; in addition, each boat has a gun mounted on the very bow. The guns are much smaller than those of the steam whalers and shoot harpoons only three feet long, with several strong barbs but without explosive points. Each iron carries with it twenty or thirty fathoms of “forerunner,” which leads to the main five-hundred-fathom line coiled in a tub at the stern of the small boat. As soon as a whale has been struck, a turn of the rope is thrown about a small post called the “puller,” to check the speed of the running line. The small boats carry four sailors each—two at the oars, one to steer, and one at the gun.