246 Naturalist at Large 



My next adventure came a few years later during a 

 Christmas vacation when I was in Banana Creek near Cape 

 Canaveral. I was fishing with Dr. Charles G. Weld in his 

 launch when we came on a porpoise that had got into 

 shallow water. We killed it with a shotgun. I have the 

 tanned skin and skull of that beast in the Museum still. 

 We both tried it for breakfast, but it tasted like cotton 

 waste soaked in cod-liver oil. Not even the liver was to 

 our minds in the least edible. 



The next chance to collect cetaceans that were really 

 useful in the Museum came right at Beverly Farms when 

 two beaked whales chasing fish on a falling tide got 

 stranded quite near where we live in summer. Their un- 

 cannily human groans, deep sobbing sounds, were audible 

 half a mile away, and had kept the neighbors uneasily 

 awake. A local fisherman came along before I did, made 

 them fast with ropes to trees on the shore, and carved his 

 initials on their hides, thus under Massachusetts laws mak- 

 ing them his own. He neglected to do anything with them 

 for several days, however, and I got authority from the 

 Board of Health to take them over. I got a tug and towed 

 them to Ten Pound Island in Gloucester Harbor. There, 

 with the advice of my friend Mr. Wilham McGinnes, then 

 Mayor of Gloucester, and with the help of some fishermen 

 whom he knew, we cut each whale into two pieces — no 

 small task, for these were big animals, eighteen to twenty 

 feet long. Luckily there was a tug in Gloucester Harbor 

 that had a powerful crane on board. Thus we were able 

 to pick up the pieces, load them into trucks, and take them 

 to a rendering plant in Danvers. In this way it was possible 

 to save both skeletons complete and these we have in the 



