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Updated: August 18, 2024
In 1785 the publication of the journals of the renowned explorer, Captain Cook, directed the ever-alert minds of the New Englanders to the great herds of seal and sea-otters on the northwestern coast of the United States, and vessels were soon faring thither in pursuit of fur-bearing animals, then plentiful, but now bidding fair to become as rare as the sperm-whale.
It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any. Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is thus annihilated; oftener the boat's bow is knocked off, or the thigh-board, in which the headsman stands, is torn from its place and accompanies the body.
Descriptions of the dying flurry of the sperm-whale are plentiful in whaling literature, many of the best of them being in that ideal whaleman's log "The Cruise of the Cachalot," by Frank T. Bullen. I quote one of these: "Suddenly the mate gave a howl: 'Starn all starn all!
The hide of these cuttle-fish-eating whales and porpoises is scratched and scarred by the hooks attached to the suckers on the arms of the great cuttle-fish, and a test of the genuine character of ambergris which forms as a concretion in the intestine of the sperm-whale is that it contains fragments of the horny beaks and hooks of the cuttle-fish digested by the whale.
While he was about this, an immense sperm-whale, about eighty-five feet long, "breached" that is, coming from a great depth, he shot out of the water his whole length and then fell back with a tremendous splash about fifty fathoms from the ship. After he fell back, he spouted three or four times, sounded, and once more appeared, this time about a ship's length off the weather bow of the Essex.
Here is a sperm-whale tooth, graven all over with cunning devices: it is the property of Karluna; it is the most precious of the damsel's ornaments. In her estimation its price is far above rubies and yet there hangs the dental jewel by its cord of braided bark, in the girl's house, which is far back in the valley; the door is left open, and all the inmates have gone off to bathe in the stream.*
Moreover, the sperm-whale had in him qualities of value that made him a richer prize than his Greenland cousin. True, he lacked the useful bone. His feeding habits did not necessitate a sieve, for, as beseems a giant, he devoured stout victuals, pieces of great squids the fabled devil-fish as big as a man's body being found in his stomach.
It was not such a trifling feat, this climbing upon the carcass of the dead whale. Nor was it to be done without danger. The slippery epidermis of the huge leviathan, lubricated as it was with that unctuous fluid which the skin of the sperm-whale is known to secrete, rendered footing upon it extremely insecure.
This is the sperm-whale fishing, an open-sea affair, and very different from that Greenland ice groping in which I served a seven-months' apprenticeship. Both, I fear, are things of the past certainly the northern fishing is so, for why should men risk their lives to get oil when one has but to sink a pipe in the ground.
It is a grey, powdery substance, and in it are embedded innumerable fragments of the horny beaks and sucker-rings of cuttle-fishes creatures which form the chief food of the sperm-whale and other toothed whales. Another "smell" which is extremely mysterious is that produced by two quartz-pebbles, or even two rock-crystals, or two pebbles of flint or of corundum, when rubbed one against the other.
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