336 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



The blue can plow along the surface of the sea at a steady fifteen 

 knots when in a hurry, but the smaller, more streamlined finner, 

 which seldom reaches eighty feet in length, can do even better. 

 There is nothing quite so awe-inspiring as to look down upon an 

 adult finner preceding a ship in clear water. I was once privileged 

 to suffer the agonies of a cruise on an overpowered, overdecorated, 

 and completely unseaworthy yacht of large dimensions and exag- 

 gerated design. Most of my time between meals, when everybody 

 else, including the captain, slept, was spent lying up in the bows. 

 My only companion there, and for three consecutive days, was a 

 finner which I calculated to be about sixty feet long. It jetted along 

 with its tail about four feet ahead of the vessel's knife-sharp prow 

 for hours on end without any apparent effort or even discernible 

 movement other than its inexplicable forward drive. But sometimes 

 it just went away ahead so fast one could hardly catch its going. 

 We were at times doing twenty knots, much to the discomfort of 

 everybody aboard, and were being shaken along by twin screws 

 of the most advanced design and by enormously powerful diesel 

 engines. The finner maintained the same speed, with only an imper- 

 ceptible twitching of its tail flukes, for hour after hour, day after 

 day, and it could still dash off at twice that speed, at least, to grab 

 a fish or something, apparently without even shifting gear. 



This animal's behavior brings up another rankling question: 

 namely, do whales sleep? Frankly, we don't know, and it would 

 seem to neither matter very much nor be a question that is even 

 amenable to any solution, for, as we have noted, mariners can fall 

 asleep and still continue pulling rhythmically on a scull for hours. 

 Perhaps the whale sleeps while on the move; perhaps he does so at 

 other times when wallowing on the surface, as humpbacks appear to 

 do; perhaps he gets along without resting at all, like so many other 

 animals. 



The rorquals, and this includes the sei, the little piked, and that 

 odd species known as Bryde's Whale (Balaenoptera brydei), which 

 seems to be a South Atlantic species, together with the humpback, 

 display the curious feature of throat "pleats" extending from the 

 chin to the navel. Although always called "pleats," these structures 

 are really deep, parallel slits which look just as if the animal had been 

 slashed with a sharp knife and the wounds had then healed over. 



