The blow hole is on left side of this “case,” the blow pipe from lungs going through it. And the jet of steam is thrown up two or three feet and forward, so a sperm’s blast is easily distinguished from that of the finner, which is bigger and straight up, say to twenty or thirty feet, or possibly forty feet, in the case of a large Blue whale.
APPENDIX
Old and New Whaling
The Greenland whaling was practically given up in 1912, and the Southern whaling for sperm and cachalot and the Southern Right whale, which in the first half of the nineteenth century employed five hundred to six hundred vessels, practically stopped forty years ago.
Why the Old Styles of Whaling stopped
The growing scarcity and wariness of the Greenland Right whale and the fall in the price of oil and whalebone gave the Balæna Mysticetus or Greenland Right whale an indefinitely prolonged close season, and in the Southern Seas the sperm and the Southern Right whale (Australis) fishing almost entirely ceased, owing to increased working expenses, smaller catches, and the fall in the price of oil.
“Modern Whaling” in North Atlantic
In 1886 Captain Svend Foyn of Tonsberg, Norway, invented the plan of capturing the powerful rorquals, commonly called Finners, that are very numerous, but were too strong and too heavy to be killed in the old style from row-boats, and which till his time had not been hunted. By his process a small cannon on the bow of a small steamer could fire a heavy harpoon, one and a half to two hundredweights, attached to a four-and-a-half hawser. This steamer and line were sufficiently buoyant and strong to play the whale and to haul its body up from the depths when it sank dead. The Greenland whale and sperm both floated when they died. Fortunes were made from the firmer whale hunting off the Norwegian coast.