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Updated: June 17, 2025
How then? The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales, without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in other and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the humpbacked whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases.
He fights hard for life; and many a whaling boat has been dashed to pieces with one blow from the powerful tail of a hunted Sperm. This great tail is set cross-wise, not upright like the tail of a fish. It is of immense power, and divided into two big "flukes," as they are called. With strong up-and-down strokes the tail propels the monster along at a great pace.
Having got all we wanted, we were bound away to finish, if luck were with us, the lading of our good ship from the teeming waters of the Solander grounds. I know the skipper's hopes were high, for he never tired of telling how, when in command of a new ship, he once fished the whole of his cargo six thousand barrels of sperm oil from the neighbourhood to which we were now bound.
"Oh!" exclaimed the Canadian, whose eyes hadn't left the ocean. "It's getting closer, it's coming into the Nautilus's waters!" Then, going on with his conversation: "You talk about sperm whales," he said, "as if they were little beasts! But there are stories of gigantic sperm whales. They're shrewd cetaceans. I hear that some will cover themselves with algae and fucus plants.
No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm whalemen are absent four years with four barrels; no wonder that to many ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can you expect to find it there when most wanted!
I note this, because these bays are famous in the annals of the Sperm Whale Fishery. The whales come here at certain seasons to calve. When ships first cruised hereabouts, I am told, they used to blockade the entrance of Lee Bay, when their boats going round by Weather Bay, passed through Narborough channel, and so had the Leviathans very neatly in a pen.
Nor is the preeminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him.
A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: the carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and straightway files it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays on board, and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking cage for it.
I should say that those New England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs I should say, that those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular.
I now understand all about this fishy smell." "And I all about the remarkable disappearance of a gallon of oil in four days. Kindling the fire with dollar and forty cent oil!" "Even so!" "What did you say to her, Mr. Smith?" "Nothing. But I rather think she'll not want me to look at her again, the huzzy!" "Kindling fire with my best sperm oil! Well, I can't get over that!"
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