134 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



In these early times it appears to have consisted only of offshore 

 hunting in small boats with a harpooner, steersman, and ten oars- 

 men. Watchtowers were constructed all along the coast and these 

 were continually manned during the fall and winter months when 

 the whales came by on their annual migrations. When whales were 

 sighted, bundles of damp straw or branches were lighted on the tower 

 tops, and drums were beaten. The nearest village rushed for the boats, 

 and when a whale was killed after the hazardous effort of hand-har- 

 pooning and lancing, it was towed ashore and carefully divided 

 according to a complicated formula. The greatest delicacy, the 

 tongue, often went to the Church, and the meat was eaten, while 

 the oil and baleen were divided amongst the hunters. Quite a lot 

 could be written on the whole procedure, but it would be only a 

 repetition of facts that we have already explained and will often 

 meet again in each case of offshore whaling. 



The only whale hunted, as stated above, was the enormous Black 

 Right Whale (Balaena biscayensis). This animal is world-wide in 

 range outside tropical and warm temperate waters. There are ap- 

 parently recognizable varieties in the North Atlantic, North Pacific, 

 South Atlantic, and South Pacific. The Dutch call them nordkaper 

 or noortkaper; Icelanders sletbag or skeltbakr; the Norse slettebak- 

 kar; the early French, the sarde; and the Basques, the sarda. In the 

 North Atlantic they are found from the region of Bear Island in 

 the extreme north in summer to an east-west line drawn from the 

 Azores to Bermuda. They have been stranded in the Mediterranean. 

 They normally travel singly or in pairs with or without young, but 

 before the semiannual migrations they used to assemble in large 

 schools called "gams." Although apparently never exceeding about 

 sixty feet in length, they are of enormous girth and bulk with an 

 utterly preposterous-looking head which accounts for a quarter of 

 their total length. The lower jaw is huge and bowed outwards and 

 upwards and, together with the enormous pendent "throat," is de- 

 signed as a sort of tank into which the baleen may be lowered. This 

 whole question of baleen is extremely hard to explain unless you 

 have personally looked into a whale's mouth. 



Baleen is a horny substance growing from the roof of the mouth 

 and is, in fact, an exaggerated development of the ridges that we can 

 feel on the roofs of our own mouths. These horny plates are tri- 



