Chapter II: Appendix

Classification of the Cetacea—Diagnoses of the whales described in
this book—The skeleton of the Cetacea—Adaptation as shown by the
Cetacea 307

INDEX 323

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

A modern shore whaling station at Kyuquot, Vancouver Island, B. C. 9

The _Orion_ with three humpback whales at Sechart, Vancouver
Island 10

The harpoon-gun on the _Rex Maru_ 13

The harpoon is tipped with a hollow point called the “bomb,” which
is filled with powder and ignited by a time fuse 15

The harpoon after it has been fired into the body of a whale 15

A trial shot with the harpoon-gun 16

A near view as the gun is fired at a target 18

Captain Balcom at the gun on the _Orion_ 23

Loading the harpoon-gun 26

Model of a humpback whale in the American Museum of Natural
History 28

“The man in the barrel called down, ‘Whales on the port bow’!” 29

“Two men with long-handled knives began to cut off the lobes of
the tail” 32

“A hollow, spear-pointed tube of steel ... was jabbed well down
into the whale’s abdomen, the engines started, and the animal
slowly filled with air” 34

Flensing a whale at one of the Vancouver Island stations 36

A humpback whale “sounding” 39

A humpback whale with a very white breast 40

“The tail of the humpback as the animal ‘sounds’ looks like a
great butterfly which has alighted upon the water” 43

“The flukes of a big humpback just disappearing below the surface
on the starboard side” 47

“The captain swung the vessel’s nose into just the right position
and they appeared close beside the starboard bow” 49

“Scrambling up, I ... snapped the camera at the huge body partly
hidden by the boat” 51

Bringing in a humpback at the end of the day’s hunt 53

“Suddenly, not more than two hundred fathoms in front of the ship,
four humpbacks spouted and began to feed” 58

Two humpback whales swimming close together at the surface 61

A humpback whale “lobtailing” 65

The tongue of a humpback whale, which has been forced out of the
animal’s mouth by air pumped into the body to keep it afloat 68

Pulling the barnacles off a humpback whale 71

A humpback partly in the water at the station in North Japan 73

The result of a single day’s hunt 76

“In some instances the whales are drawn out upon the slip in the
Norwegian way” 78

“She was listing far to starboard and we could see the huge flukes
of a blue whale ... waving at her bow” 80

“A steel wire cable was looped about the tail just in front of the
flukes, and the huge carcass drawn slowly upward over the end of
the wharf” 81

“Section by section the carcass was cut apart and drawn upward to
fall into the hands of the men on the wharf and be sliced into
great blocks two or three feet square” 83

“Transverse incisions were made in the portion of the body
remaining in the water, a hook was fastened to a blanket piece
and as the blubber was torn off by the winch the carcass rolled
over and over” 85

The inner side of a strip of blubber as it is being torn from a
whale 87

“What ... remains is first tried out to extract the oil, then
chipped by means of hand knives, and dried in the sun for
fertilizer” 88

Whale meat on the washing platforms ready to be sent to market 89

The whaling station at Aikawa, North Japan 92

A sei whale on the slip at Aikawa 93

The spout of a sei whale 94

“He ... would sometimes swim just under the surface with only the
tip of the dorsal fin exposed” 95

“I pressed the button of the camera as the broad back came into
view” 97

The sei whale 98

“The winch was then started and the whale drawn slowly toward the
ship” 99

A sei whale at Aikawa, Japan 101

“‘There’s a whale dead ahead. He spouted six times’” 102

“The click of the camera and the crash of the gun sounding at
almost the same instant” 103

“We were just off Kinka-san at half-past six, and by seven were
blowing the whistle at the entrance to the bay” 105

“We hunted them for two hours, trying first one and then the
other—they had separated—without once getting near enough even
for pictures” 107

“He was running fast but seldom stayed down long, his high
sickle-shaped dorsal fin cutting the surface first in one
direction, then in another” 108

“Always the center of a screaming flock of birds which sometimes
swept downward in a cloud, dipping into the waves and rising
again, the water flashing in myriads of crystal drops from their
brown wings” 109

A sei whale showing a portion of the soft fatty tongue 110

“In the mirror of my camera I could see the enormous gray head
burst from the water, the blowholes open and send forth a cloud
of vapor, and the slim back draw itself upward, the water
streaming from the high fin as it cut the surface” 112

“Then turning about with his entire head projecting from the water
like the bow of a submarine, he swam parallel with the ship” 115

“I was ... gazing down into the blue water and waiting to catch a
glimpse of the body as it rose, when suddenly a dark shape
glided swiftly under the ship’s bow” 116

“Two boat hooks were jabbed into the shark’s gills and it was
hauled along the ship’s side until it could be pulled on deck” 118

Making the sei whale fast to the bow of the ship 119

A sei whale swimming directly away from the ship 120

“For many years the sei whale was supposed to be the young of
either the blue or the finback whale, and it was not until 1828
that it was recognized by science as being a distinct species” 122

A sei whale fast to the ship 123

A blue whale, eighty-five feet long, at Kyuquot, Vancouver Island 125

“In the water the sei whale may be easily recognized at a
considerable distance by the form of the spout and the high
dorsal fin which is prominently displayed as the animal swims at
the surface” 126

“The sei whale has a roving disposition and wanders restlessly
from one coast to another, sometimes ... suddenly appearing in
waters where it has never before been known” 127

“Suddenly a cloud of white vapor shot into our very faces and a
great dripping body rounded out under the ship’s bow” 129

“For ten minutes the silence continued, then the Captain said in a
quiet voice: ‘There he is, far away on the beam!’” 131

“I ran on deck just as the great brute rounded up right beside the
bow and the gun flashed out in the darkness” 134

“The rope attached to the first harpoon floated backward in
dangerous proximity to the propeller and it required some
careful work to get the animal fast to the bow and the line
safely out of the way” 137

Bringing the blue whale to the station 138

A blue whale at Aikawa, Japan 141

An eighty-two foot blue whale at Vancouver Island 142

The open mouth of a blue whale 144

The upper jaw of a blue whale, showing the mat of hairlike
bristles on the inner edges of the baleen plates 145

Posterior view of a blue whale on the slip at Aikawa, Japan 149

The flipper of a humpback whale 150

After the humpback’s flipper has been stripped of blubber 151

The folds on the throat of a finback whale 152

A cross section of the folds on the breast of a humpback whale 154

The eye and ear of a blue whale 155

The skull of an eighty-foot blue whale, the skeleton of which was
sent to the American Museum of Natural History from Japan 157

“The finback whale is the greyhound of the sea ... for its
beautiful slender body is built like a racing yacht and the
animal can surpass the speed of the fastest ocean steamship” 159

“I was standing on the bridge with the camera focused and pressed
the button as they rose to the surface” 160

“An instant later came the crash of the harpoon-gun and the
nearest whale, throwing its flukes and half its body out of the
water, turned head down in a long dive” 162

The finback whale reaches a length of about seventy-five feet 163

“I had climbed to the barrel at the masthead ... and was watching
the little pram as it neared the dying finback” 165

Marked with a flag and left to float until the end of the day’s
hunt 166

The whale is made fast to the bow by a heavy chain and the ship
starts on the long tow to the station 167

“Sorenson hesitated, swung the gun a little to one side and fired” 170

Bringing in a finback 171

A finback lying in the water at Aikawa just before it is “cut in” 172

Drawing up a finback at Aikawa, Japan 173

The long slender body of a finback lying on its side; the outer
edges of the whalebone plates in the mouth are well shown 175

The spout of a finback whale 177

A finback whale “sounding” or taking the “big dive” 179

When sounding the finback sinks lower and lower until the dorsal
fin disappears; this is the last part of the body to leave the
surface 180

A finback taking an “intermediate” or “surface” dive 182

The upper jaw of a finback whale, showing the bristles on the
inner edges of the baleen plates 184

The side view of a model of a gray whale in the American Museum of
Natural History prepared under the direction of the author from
studies made in Korea 188

A ventral view of the gray whale model 189

The whaling station at Ulsan, Korea 190

“At the port bow hung the dark flukes of a whale, the sight of
which made me breathe hard with excitement” 191

Cutting in a gray whale 193

“When the winch began slowly to lift the huge black body out of
the water, a very short examination told me that the _kaku
kujira_ really was the long-lost gray whale” 194

Cutting through the body of a gray whale 198

The posterior part of a gray whale 200

The flukes of a gray whale 203

A strip of blubber from the back of a gray whale with the short
flipper at the end of it 205

Captain Melsom about to lance a gray whale from the pram 209

After the death stroke 211

“The killer is the wolf of the sea and like the land wolves hunts
in packs of twenty or more individuals which will attack and
devour almost anything that swims” 216

A posterior view of a killer showing the high dorsal fin 217

An anterior view of a killer 222

A sperm whale lying on the slip at Kyuquot, Vancouver Island 224

Stripping the blubber from the head of a sperm whale 226

“The sperm ... has from eighteen to twenty-five massive teeth on
each side of the lower jaw; these fit into sockets in the upper
jaw and assist in holding the whale’s food” 228

Cutting away the “junk” from the “case” of a sperm whale 229

An interior view of a young male sperm whale 231

The tongue of a sperm whale; it is strikingly different from the
enormous flabby tongue of the whalebone whales 233

The head of the sixty-foot sperm whale, the skeleton of which was
sent to the American Museum of Natural History, from Japan 234

A posterior view of the head of the Museum’s sperm whale 236

A female sperm whale at Aikawa, Japan 239

A posterior view of the Museum’s sperm whale 241

Cutting in a sperm whale at sea by the old-time method 242

A model of a right whale in the American Museum of Natural History 246

A small (calf) right whale on the beach at Amagansett, L. I. 247

Stripping the blubber from the large right whale at Amagansett 250

The Amagansett whale covered with ice after the blubber had been
stripped off the carcass 252

“We had to stand in freezing water while cutting away at the huge
mass of flesh which encased the bones” 254

The baleen of a right whale 256

The white whale, or white porpoise 268

The posterior part of a white whale 271

“A big white fellow slipped under only a hundred feet away, headed
directly for us” 273

“We beached it in a sandy cove, where the gray rock wall rose in a
jagged mass, making a perfect background for the white body, its
purity intensified by the bright red streaks of blood which
dripped from the bullet holes” 276

“They are taken with a net of extra heavy twine, about 1,000 feet
long, which is placed about 200 yards outside the line of surf
and parallel with it” 279

“Thirty-three porpoises were beached in the haul of the seine
which provided our specimens” 281

“Immediately after their capture at Hatteras ... the porpoises
were placed for 24 hours in a deep salt water pond, just back of
the ocean beach” 285

“The captive porpoises are very lively, and keep swimming day and
night, rising to blow usually with each circuit of the pool” 288

A school of blackfish at Cape Cod 293

A Pacific blackfish (_Globicephalus scammoni_) 294

A skeleton of a finback whale in the American Museum of Natural
History 303

WHALE HUNTING
WITH GUN AND CAMERA