The Whale | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 9, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 38.

The Whale.

SINCE it lives in the water, the whale ought to be a fish, but it is not. It has the general external appearance of a fish, but that is all. The fish is cold-blooded and can breathe under water, while the whale is warm-blooded, and can no more breathe under water than you or I can; it must put its nostrils out of water and let out the used-up air from its lungs and take in good air again precisely the same as a man. Of course it takes in a very large supply of air, because it sometimes remains under water as long as an hour. Sailors speak of the whale as spouting, and in pictures the animal is shown usually with two fountains playing out of the top of its head. That is a mistake, for whales do not spout any water at all. What seems something like water is in reality only the hot breath rising in the frosty air and condensing just as your own breath will in winter. Sometimes, too, the whale begins to breathe before its head is out of water, and then, of course, some water is forced up into the air.

Some whales are no larger than a man, and some are eighty feet long. The head of a big whale is a great deal bigger than an elephant. But large as they are, they are terribly active, as many a hapless whaler knows, and forty-five miles an hour in tow of one of these monsters has sometimes been experienced. The tail is the usual weapon of the whale, and the only one of the whale-bone whale, though the sperm whale has a formidable set of teeth in a very large mouth, and can do a very great deal of damage when disposed to bite a boat in twain. Several times, too, it has happened that a whale has used its head against a ship as a battering-ram. The ship has usually been crushed in and sunk.

The whale oil is obtained by boiling down the immense layer of fat which incases the whole body of the whale, and a good whale has been known to yield from the blubber alone one hundred barrels of oil. And besides this in the sperm whale there are always several barrels of oil in a liquid form which has only to be dipped out by the bucketful. The whale-bone, as it is generally called, is not really the bone of the whale, but is a strange substitute for teeth, which some whales have. It grows from each side of the upper jaw along the gums, and is some six feet or more long. The lower ends are frayed out like fringe, and are used by the whale to strain water through. It swims through the water with its huge mouth wide open, taking in jelly-fish, and anything else that comes in its way. By and by it closes down the whalebone, or baleen, as it is called, and forces the water out of its mouth, leaving the jelly-fish and other objects caught in the fringe. The whale then eats at its leisure.

Dolphins, porpoises, narwals, and grampuses are all members of the whale family. In times past the porpoise used to be eaten, and was considered good food enough for even the royal table. What is known as porpoise leather, however, is really made from the hide of the beluga, or white whale.

Most of the whales are peaceful in disposition, and the large Greenland and sperm whales particularly are not usually disposed to be vicious; but some of the smaller whales are frequently on the war-path, and can be very dangerous even to man. This is strikingly the case with the orca, or killer, as it is sometimes called. It goes in schools like the porpoise and dolphin, but in fewer numbers, and will attack any living thing that comes in its way, being, if possible, more ravenous and blood-thirsty than the shark. Even the great Greenland whale with its eighty feet of length fears the active little killer with its eighteen or twenty feet of length, and with good reason, for when a pack of these sea-hounds start in pursuit of the leviathan, they never cease until they have killed it. They swim around the great whale and under it; they leap far out of water, and, coming head first on the broad back, snatch great mouthfuls of flesh from it; and when the worried monster opens its cavernous mouth in the vain hope of ingulfing some of its tormentors, they absolutely rush in and carry off mouthfuls of the huge tongue. The killer is the terror of the ocean, more feared by the denizens of the water than any other creature.

At one time the large whales were quite plentiful, but years of vigorous pursuit by man have so thinned their numbers that comparatively few were to be found ten years ago. It is probable that if the large production of petroleum had not come to the rescue of the whale, it would by this time have been exhausted. As it is, it has had a respite for ten or twenty years, and now it has increased so greatly in numbers that once more whaling bids fair to become an industry along our north-eastern coast.