Twilight in the South 335 



was recorded by Lieutenant Waldon C. Winston on a Japanese 

 whaler in 1949, and is stated to have weighed 136.40 metric tons 

 (approximately 124 short tons of 2000 pounds, such as we use in 

 America); the other, handled at Stromness shore station in South 

 Georgia in 1926 and published by R. B. Robertson in his wonderful 

 book Of Whales and Men, totaled 120 long tons (134 of our tons). 

 These figures seem to confirm that the larger whales, at least, weigh 

 about one and a half tons per foot of length — and not one ton per 

 foot as previously thought. Some of the items noted in these records 

 are, however, much more amazing than these colossal over-all figures. 



We note, first, that fifty-six tons of "meat" are available from an 

 eighty-nine-foot whale and that there then remains a residue of no 

 less than twenty-two tons of bones, twenty-six tons of blubber, and 

 such other delightful little items as eight tons of blood, one and a 

 half tons of intestines apart from a half-ton stomach, a one-ton liver, 

 and half-ton kidneys and heart. The tongue weighs over three tons, 

 and the lungs over one ton. The baleen amounts to one ton also, and 

 the remainder of the total is made up of such comparative minutiae 

 as a uterus weighing over half a ton and a pair of twenty-five-pound 

 ovaries. 



The whole thing is on such a colossal scale that it becomes almost 

 incomprehensible, and statistics, as usual, become pointless, so let 

 me sum up by telling you that at the age of nine I performed the 

 spectacular but rather pointless feat of wriggling through the main 

 artery of a seventy-foot whale into the heart of the animal to enter- 

 tain a group of Norwegian and Sheltie flensers at a shore station in 

 the Shetlands. Whales are just so big you cannot appreciate them even 

 when you see them. That is why a piece of rorqual skin that I have 

 kept for years as a marker in a book on whaling always gives people 

 such a surprise. They think it is a sheet of thin carbon paper! There 

 are other surprises about rorquals. These vastest of living things feed, 

 apparently exclusively in the case of the blue, on small crustaceous 

 creatures related to shrimps and known to science as Euphausia and 

 to whalemen as "krill." Over a ton of these may be taken from one 

 stomach. The finner, however, also eats small fish, notably herring 

 and, in the north, particularly a species known as Osmerus arcticus, 

 of which up to a thousand have been taken out of a single stomach 

 of this species. 



