Whales 247 



Museum. I may add that, here again, this whale adventure 

 was odoriferous in the extreme. 



Now to Virginia Beach in the autumn of 1938. 1 walked 

 to get tlie mail, from our house at the Sand Bridge Club. 

 The mailman drove down the beach every other day, 

 leaving our mail in a box on top of a high post. Walking 

 about and waiting for the mailman's arrival, I saw a black 

 object near the surf. It was a pygmy sperm whale. This 

 was small enough so that we could haul it right to the Club 

 House, ice it, and send it to Cambridge. It had a deep cut 

 across the back of its neck. I am quite sure it was killed by 

 getting too near the propeller of a steamer. 



The next year, almost to a day, I walked down the same 

 road with my young friends Barbara and WilUam Schevill 

 and was telling them about finding the little whale. We 

 had no sooner reached the mailbox than I saw a black 

 object in about the same position and then, looking down 

 the beach, saw another. Since one of these individuals, 

 which both turned out to be pygmy sperm whales, was ob- 

 viously immature, we concentrated on the adult specimen, 

 which we found was a lactating female with an embryo 

 about a foot long in her uterus. Both of these whales had 

 been killed by a sharp cut across the back of the head in 

 exactly the same way as the one we found the previous 

 year. After finding these two Uttle whrJes, it suddenly oc- 

 curred to me that just the day before from the top of a 

 near-by sand dune I had watched the southward passage 

 of a large flotilla of torpedo boats which had passed out 

 from the Virginia Capes southward bound. I suspect it was 

 one of these that killed them. 



