334 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



ence and familiarity should crystallize the whole procedure into a 

 whaleman's tradition; then all will be well. For the rest, it is up to 

 the whales. 



Now the bases of the second phase of modern whaling are two 

 mammals — the finner, common rorqual, or finback whale and the 

 blue, Sibbald's Rorqual, or sulphur-bottomed whale. Both have 

 sundry other names of even less pertinence than the appellation 

 "sulphur-bottomed" for the blue, which only applies to rare indi- 

 viduals that happen to have their undersides infested with a certain 

 form of algae which, when spread in a thin film, looks yellow-green 

 in sunlight. These animals are closely related, but the latter is much 

 greater than the former. 



The blue whale is, as far as we know, the largest living thing on 

 earth today, but it is quite unwise to state, as it is a common practice 

 to do, that it is the largest thing that ever lived on this earth. It is true 

 that the record African elephant standing on the inner side of the 

 skin of the belly of a blue whale would still have eight feet clearance 

 above its head, and the largest dinosaur, say an Atlantosaurus could 

 stand, with its mate, inside the hollowed-out skin of one, but both 

 elephants and dinosaurs are aerial beasts and comparatively small. 

 Bodies buoyed up by water can be much vaster, and even the record 

 blue whale, measuring 1 1 3 feet and probably weighing as much as 

 170 tons, does not appear to represent the upper limit of size for 

 an amphibious creature, and there may have been much bigger ones 

 in the past. There are certain teeth of sharks found fossilized which 

 could fit only jaws so much greater than any known today that the 

 animals who possessed them must have had heads of positively monu- 

 mental size. Sharks tend to have large heads, anyway, but the ratio 

 of head to body could hardly have been much greater than that of 

 a bowhead whale. Even if we allow for such grotesque proportions, 

 the fishy owners of these fabulous teeth could well have exceeded 

 the blue whale in bulk. This is a ghastly thought, for the size of this 

 animal is quite staggering. 



Whales have been measured for centuries, but have been weighed 

 accurately only a few times. The first attempt was made in 1903 but 

 gave results that are now highly suspect, since the weight came out 

 at less than one ton per foot of the animal's length. Two females of 

 eighty-nine feet in length have now been weighed scientifically. One 



