CHAPTER XIX
A STRANGE GIANT OF THE OCEAN
Of all the strange animals which live in the sea the sperm whale is certainly one of the most extraordinary; whenever I look at one I feel like saying with the country boy who had just seen his first camel:
“There ain’t no such thing, b’gosh.”
A sperm whale lying on the slip at Kyuquot, Vancouver Island. Note the slender lower jaw and the small side fins.
Its head, which occupies one-third of the entire body, is rectangular in shape, and contains an immense tank filled with liquid oil known as “spermaceti.” It is only necessary to cut an opening in the “case,” as this portion of the head is called, and with a bucket dip out ten or fifteen barrels of oil.
Spermaceti congeals slightly when cooled and in appearance is much like soft white paraffin. Beneath the oil-case is a great mass of cellular tissue, called the “junk,” which also contains spermaceti although not in a liquid condition. Spermaceti is used almost entirely for lubricating fine pieces of machinery and its quality is very much superior to the oil obtained from the blubber.
The use to the whale of the oil-case is largely a matter of conjecture. My own belief is that it acts as a great reservoir and that the animal draws upon it for nourishment during periods of food scarcity. Bears, seals, and other animals store up on their bodies great quantities of fat which enable them to live without food during hibernation, or the breeding period, and the sperm whale is possibly a similar case; some specimens are killed which are “dry,” and have practically no oil in either the blubber or head.
Spermaceti should not be confused with “ambergris,” a substance of great value in the manufacture of perfumes, which is obtained only from the sperm whale. Ambergris is due to a pathological condition of the intestines and is never found in healthy whales. It is impossible to tell just how the substance is formed, but the fact that it often contains cuttlefish beaks leads to the supposition that it is in some way connected with the squid and cuttlefish upon which the sperm whale feeds.
Stripping the blubber from the head of a sperm whale. Immediately beneath the blubber of this portion is the oil-case. The blowhole may be seen at the end of the snout.
If but a small amount of ambergris is produced it will often pass off with the excreta and, since it is very light, may be found floating in the water, but the entire intestines of dead whales have been known to be clogged with the substance. It is exceedingly valuable, the black ambergris being worth at the present time $12.50 an ounce, and the gray, which is of superior quality, $20. As much as $60,000 worth has been taken from the intestines of a single whale.
It is not itself used as an odor but as a fixative in perfumes; that is, to make the fragrance last. Many substitutes for ambergris have been adopted in commercial work, but as yet none has been found which is as effective as the original substance.
For hundreds of years ambergris has been known and used in various ways. It was formerly supposed to have wonderful medicinal qualities (which, however, are largely mythical) and in Asia was employed as a spice in cooking. The Turks have long considered it of the greatest value, and pilgrims who traveled to Mecca used to bring it as an offering. Ambergris has a peculiar and not disagreeable odor which, when once identified, will not easily be forgotten; after touching it traces of the smell will still remain even though the hands have received several washings.
During the last eight years at least fifty persons have brought to my office for identification almost as many different substances which they have found floating or washed up on the seacoast, and which they devoutly prayed might prove to be ambergris. One man brought as a sample a large piece of tallow from a barrelful which he had collected at considerable trouble and expense; another had a portion of a jellyfish, and a third carefully treasured a mass of dirty soap. But as yet no one has brought “the real thing.” Ambergris is soluble in alcohol and this is a good first test for those to whom the substance is unknown.
The sperm is by far the largest member of the toothed whale family and 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. Upper teeth are also present but are in a rudimentary condition and, except in rare cases, do not protrude into the sockets; undoubtedly in ancient times the upper teeth were as well developed as the lower but since they have not been needed they have gradually atrophied and almost disappeared. Like the teeth of other animals, those of the sperm whale are hollow in the basal half of their length for the reception of nerves; in young whales this nerve cavity is wide and deep but it almost closes with increasing age.
“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.”
Quite frequently the lower jaw of an immature animal will be injured and as the whale grows its jaw becomes twisted like an enormous corkscrew. The widespreading posterior part of the jaw is called the “panbone” and from it the sailors make walking sticks, pie-markers, hairpins, and carvings which are often beautifully executed. “Scrimshawing,” or drawing upon whale’s teeth, also helps to while away many weary hours when the ship lies still in a tropic calm.
Cutting away the “junk” from the “case” of a sperm whale. The junk is a mass of cellular tissue which also contains spermaceti.
The sperm whale is a lover of warm currents which favor the giant squid and cuttlefish on which it lives, and although it has been taken as far north as the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, even there it is in the comparatively warm waters of the Japanese stream; it has also been captured in the sub-Antarctic near the Falkland Islands.
The squid reach a length of twenty feet or more and the whale sometimes has terrific battles with its huge prey, the tentacles of which, armed with deadly suckers, tear long gashes in the skin of the head and snout, leaving white scars crisscrossed in every direction. In Japan I took several enormous spiny lobsters from the stomach of a sperm whale, as well as the remains of a shark and seventy or eighty yellow parrot-like beaks of the cuttlefish.
Unlike the whalebone whales, of which the opposite is true, the male sperm is very much larger than the female, and an old bull will sometimes reach a length of seventy feet and weigh eighty or ninety tons. Such an animal is a truly colossal creature. The head of a sixty-foot sperm, which was killed by Captain Fred Olsen in Japan especially for the American Museum, was almost twenty feet in length, and the skull, when crated, had a space measurement of twenty-six tons; it was so large that it would barely pass through the main hatch of the steamship which carried it to New York.
The sperm has only a single S-shaped blowhole situated almost at the end of the snout on the left side, and its spout, which is like that of no other whale, may be easily recognized even at a considerable distance; the low, bushy, vapor column is directed diagonally forward and upward, and the animal blows much oftener and more regularly than other large cetaceans. A sperm may spout thirty or forty times when not disturbed, generally lying still but occasionally swimming slowly during the entire breathing period.
An anterior view of a young male sperm whale. The head occupies one-third the entire length of the animal and the lower jaw is much shorter than the upper.
When a bull is wallowing at the surface, the “hump” (corresponding to the dorsal fin of the fin whales) is first seen, and at regular intervals, as the spout is ejected, the nose appears some forty feet ahead. The length of time he stays at the surface, the number of spouts, and the interval between them are all very regular and thus the hunters, after a particular whale has been observed for a few minutes, know exactly when the animal will again appear and how long it will remain visible.
After its blowing has been finished, the head gradually sinks, the back and “small” are curved upward, the flukes are lifted slowly high into the air, and the whale goes straight down.
During the “big dive” the animal remains below from fifteen to forty minutes and when reappearing, if not disturbed, swims tranquilly along just below the surface at a rate of about three or four miles an hour. His body is then horizontal, with the hump projecting above the water.
When frightened and speeding, a totally different attitude is assumed and the great flukes are moved violently up and down; at each downward stroke the head sinks eight or ten feet below the surface but rises with the upward motion, presenting only the cutwater-like lower portion. The upstroke of the tail appears to be the more powerful of the two, and at the same time the broad upper half of the head is lifted above the surface. A speed of ten or twelve miles an hour can be reached in this way, which the whalers describe as “going head out.”
The sperm is very playful and like the humpback frequently “breaches,” or throws itself out of water, shooting into the air at an angle of about 45 degrees and falling back upon its side. It sometimes lobtails also, pounding the water into spray with its flukes. When a sperm is harpooned with a hand iron it often rolls over and over on the surface, winding the line about its body and causing the hunters a deal of trouble.
The tongue of a sperm whale; it is strikingly different from the enormous flabby tongue of the whalebone whales.
Along the Japanese coast during July the sperm whales sometimes appear in enormous herds of four hundred or more; the great animals will lie at the surface spouting continually and the sea for half a mile will be alive with whales.
When the steam whalers find a school of this sort, signals are set to bring in all the ships which may be near, and there is excitement enough for everyone. The guns bang as often as they can be loaded and the whales made fast, and the number killed is merely a question of how many harpoons each ship carries, or the hours of daylight left when the herd is found.
The head of the sixty-foot sperm whale, the skeleton of which was sent to the American Museum of Natural History, from Japan. The “case” yielded 20 barrels of spermaceti.
The school will usually move very slowly, blowing and wallowing along at the surface, and the animals in the center are heedless of the slaughter on the outskirts of the herd. At times, however, the whales will stampede at the first gun, and it then becomes a stern chase, which is often a long one, before a ship can get fast.
At Aikawa, one day, a whale ship with a Japanese gunner raised a herd of sperms a long way from the village. The man allowed his greed to get the better of his judgment and killed ten whales. He made them all fast to the ship, which could barely move her load through the water, and it was not until three days later that she arrived at the station. The whales had all “blasted,” or decomposed, and were not as valuable commercially as a single fresh one would have been.
The meat of this species is so dark and full of oil that it is of but little use as food. Nevertheless, during the summer it is sold to the native coal miners of Japan who live in such extreme poverty that they are glad to get even such meat at two or three sen per pound.
I shall not attempt to chronicle here the numerous authentic instances of ships or boats which have been destroyed and sunk by sperm whales, for they are the common property of every book on deep-sea whaling. They leave no doubt that these animals often turn the tables on their hunters and attack with savage ferocity and dire results.
Apparently the sperm is the only whale which will deliberately turn upon its pursuers when not in its death flurry. Not only is its tail used with terrible effectiveness in sweeping the surface of the water and delivering smashing blows, but boats are often crushed like kindling wood between its horrible jaws.
It would be interesting to know how long sperm whales live. The bull which was killed in Japan for the American Museum showed unmistakable evidences of great age. Its head was covered with white crisscrossed scars, bearing testimony of terrific battles with giant squids in the ocean depths, and the teeth of its lower jaw were worn almost flat, projecting only an inch or two above the gum. The bones of its skeleton were hard and rough, being covered with tubercles and bony growths.
A posterior view of the head of the Museum’s sperm whale. The thick covering of blubber which encircles the head is well shown.
All this indicated that the animal had lived for many years, but how many it is impossible to tell. The condition of the skeleton shows whether a whale is old or young, for in immature animals the bones of the skull are separated (i. e., the sutures are open), the plates on the end of the vertebræ (epiphyses) are free, and all the bones are soft and spongy. Even though the whale may have reached adult size, which it usually does in three or four years, the evidences of youth are still present in the skeleton.
Reasoning by analogy (which is always unsafe), I have come to the conclusion that a whale’s life is well within one hundred years, but I must admit that my argument is mainly theory and that there are but few facts with which it may be supported. Until recently, many naturalists held the view that whales lived for hundreds of years and that they did not reach adult size until long after birth. The latter contention has been proved utterly wrong, but of the former we have little new knowledge; neither do I see how we can ever estimate a whale’s age with any degree of accuracy.