But during the centuries these Right whales and sperm were being killed there were other larger and much more powerful whales, easily distinguished from the “Right whales” by the fin on their backs. These were to be found in all the oceans and were unattacked by men. They have only a little whalebone in their mouths and were much too powerful to be killed by the old methods.
Once or twice the old whalers by accident harpooned one of these “modern whales” or finners, and the tale of their adventure, as told by one of Mr Bullen’s Yankee harpooneers, bears out exactly what we ourselves experienced down in the Antarctic, off Graham’s Land, in 1892-1893, when one of our men tried to do the same. We had been for months hopelessly looking for Right whale and only saw these big finners in great numbers close alongside of our boats, so one of our harpooneers in desperation fastened to one.
In his book, “The Cruise of the Cachalot,” Mr Bullen describes sighting a finner whilst they were hunting the more pacific sperm or cachalot. Bullen asks his mentor, a coloured harpooneer, why he doesn’t harpoon it, when Goliath the harpooneer turns to him with a pitying look, as he replies:
“Sonny, ef yeu wuz to go and stick iron into dat ar fish yew’d fink de hole bottom fell eout kerblunk. Wen I wiz young’n foolish, a finback ranged ’longside me one day off de Seychelles. I just gone miss’a spam whale, and I was kiender mad—muss ha’ bin. Wall, I let him hab it blam ’tween de ribs. If I lib ten tousan year, ain’t gwine ter fergit dat ar wan’t no time ter spit, tell ye; eberybody hang ober de side ob de boat. Wuz-poof! de line all gone, Clar to glory, I neber see it go. Ef it hab ketch anywhar, nobody ever see us too. Fus, I fought I jump ober de side—neber face de skipper any mo’.”
I have described our similar experience elsewhere—Weddel sea in the Antarctic—with the old-style whaling tackle and a hundred to one hundred and ten foot blue whale or finner. It took out three miles of lines from our small boats—the lines were got hold of from board ship, and the whale towed the procession for thirty hours under and over ice, on to rocks; then the harpoons drew, and it went off “with half Jock Todd’s smithy shop in its tail”—our sailor’s parlance for its going off with most of our shoulder gun explosive bombs in its lower lumbar regions. These big fellows were so numerous in the ice off Graham’s Land that we sometimes thought it advisable to keep them off our small boats with rifle bullets.
Now we can kill these big fellows. Captain Svend Foyn, a Norwegian, mastered them by developing a new harpoon. Svend Foyn and the engineer Verkseier H. Henriksen in Tonsberg worked it out together. A big harpoon fired from a cannon, a heavy cable and a small steamer combined made the finner whales man’s prey. Captain Foyn had made a considerable fortune at Arctic seal-hunting, and thereafter spent five years of hard and unsuccessful labour before he perfected his new method in 1868. Eighteen years later there were thirty-four of such steamers engaged in the industry in the North Atlantic, to-day there are sixty-four hunting from the Falkland Islands and other dependencies. In the neighbourhood of Cape Horn last year their gross return amounted to £1,350,000.
These Balænoptera, averaging fifty to ninety feet, are fast swimmers and when harpooned go off at a great speed and require an immense harpoon to hold them, and when dead they sink, and their weight is sufficient to haul a string of small boats under the sea. To bring them to the surface a very powerful hawser is attached to the harpoon, and is wound up by a powerful steam winch on the ninety-foot steamer, which can be readily towed by the whale, but which is also sufficiently buoyant to pull it to the surface when it is dead and has sunk.
In order that a whale may not break this five-inch hawser (or five and a half inches in circumference) the little vessel or steamer must be fairly light and handy, so as to be easily swung round. If the steamer were heavy and slow, the hawser, however thick, would snap, as it sometimes does even with the small vessel when the whale puts on a sudden strain.
In the old style the Greenland whale which floated when it was dead was pulled alongside the sailing-vessel, when the whalebone was cut out of its mouth and stowed on board, as was also the fat or blubber, and the carcass was left to go adrift. The sperm also floats when dead.