The Kenosha telegraph. [volume] (Kenosha, Wis.) 1860-1888, 1875-04-01
About Whales.


Youths Companion
About Whales.
Much might be said of whales, but it
has nearly all been said before. The
whale has points that cannot fail to in
terest any one who gets very near to
him and the most striking of these, I
may say, is the tail, otherwise called
" fukes. He has dangerous habit of
lifting it when he becomes aware that an
enemy is near : and there is no lodging
it when it moves dark flash, and it is
all over. It is great deal heavier than
it looks to be. You might as well be
in the way of cannon ball.
| I found the tail always interesting
when we were fast to whale but after
we had killed him and were cutting him
in, my attention was generally turned to
the head. A right-whale's head is so
different from all other heads, that one
wonders at it. In forming it, the Al
mighty seems to have designed that this
greatest of all animate things should
subsist on kind of food peculiar to it.
self. Whalemen call it "squid." Prob
ably professors call it by some other
name but whalemen care little about
that.
"Squid'' is soft, ielly-hke substance
| found floating in large fields in those
parts of the ocean the whale most fre-
quents. To understand how he feeds
upon it we must know about his head;
and I will say that it is very large in
proportion to his body. This might lead
one to infer that the whale has large
stomach also, which is not the case. In
deed it is affirmed that right-whale can
swallow nothing larger than herring;
which, if true, would prove conclusively
that it could not have been right-whale
that swallowed Jonah.
Instead of teeth the right-whale has
set in the upper part of his mouth, upon
each side of strong bony keel, as it
we're, slabs of bone-the common black
halebone of commerce. According to
description I have lately seen, "these
slabs are from eighteen inches to ten
feet in length, shaped somewhat like
blade tapering to point along the en-
| tire length, on one side being quite
thick, nearly two inches, and on the
other coming almost to an edge, which
is fringed with flaments resembling
very coarse hairs. The slabs are at
tached to the palate by their bases, hang
down into the mouth, and, from being
placed transversely, their edges are par
allel and at q very small distance from
each other, the base of each, as we'll as
the outer edge, being composed Of solid
whalebone, while the inner edge termin-
ates in filament of the fibres mentioned,
which fills up the whole interior of the
mouth like curtain set across it. I"
This description looks q little misty at
first; but by reading it over several
times, one can get the hang Of it and un-
derstand it pretty well. If the commas
had held out, most likely it would have
been made palmer.
When the whale feeds, he simply
opens his mouth, and rushes forward till
it is we'll filled, when he closes it and
elects the water, the hairy filament that
| lines the mouth acting as strainer to re-
tain all else within it, and then he swal-
lows his food. Repeating the process,
he goes on till he has completed his meal,
or till something disturbs him, for he is
| uOU always dIlOW0u W Ithe Ills ullulor LII
peace.
I would like to give the measurement
of some of our whales but, if I ever
made any figures, have lost them and
cannot do it now. Those we took on the
Crozets were small, compared with those
saw on the northwest coast. I think
they averaged about 100 barrels Of oil
each, and were perhaps sixty or seventy
feet in length, with breadth of beam of
say eight feet. On the northwest our
whales must have averaged near 200 bar
rels each. Once we captured two to-
gether that made us over 500 barrels of
oil. I suppose those were about as large,
possibly the largest whales that were ever
taken. There was hardly any peroep-
tible difference in their size, and they
must have been nearly 100 feet in length.
When secured alongside, they reached
from the bow port of our ship clear past
the stern. Monstrous gray old fellows
they were.
The whale has some interesting pecu-
iarities. He always runs dead to wind
ward to escape pursuing boats; and it
would seem as If he must be guided by
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