10 WHALING 



times nearly white. His yield of oil varies greatly, from 

 twenty to seventy barrels. 



Besides right whales, fin whales, and sperm whales, is another 

 group called the beaked whales, of which only one, the bottle- 

 nose, is known to commerce. Like the rest of his group the 

 bottlenose is small, seldom over thirty feet long, and very quick 

 of motion. His name comes from his curious, bottle-shaped 

 snout, above which is an extraordinary forehead, flattened 

 perpendicularly. In this forehead, as in the sperm whale's 

 "case," is spermaceti of excellent quality, and a full-grown male 

 will yield, besides two tuns of body oil, two hundredweight of 

 this spermaceti — a large amount in proportion to his size. 

 Bottlenose whaling was done mainly in the Arctic, beginning 

 about fifty years ago, but it was only a brief phase of the 

 industry as a whole, for although whalers are a hardy crew, the 

 bottlenose led them a terrific chase: with an amazing speed in 

 sounding when struck, he ran out whale lines so fast that, in 

 proportion to the few years that it was practised, there were 

 more fatal accidents in bottlenose whaling than in whaling of 

 any other sort. 



Let us not, however, confuse the bottlenose whale and his 

 small brother, the bottlenose porpoise, which is found on our 

 own coast, particularly about Cape Hatteras, where whole 

 schools of them are taken at once in nets of extra heavy twine. 

 This little chap is never over twelve feet long, has a similar 

 out-thrust beak, with strong teeth in both jaws. His dorsal fin 

 is strongly developed and his powers of locomotion are ap- 

 parently endless. He too has a valuable "case'' oil, commonly 

 known as porpoise oil, which, like that of his big brother, is 

 used as a lubricant for the delicate mechanisms of clocks and 

 watches. 



The three now remaining on our list, though popularly they 

 are all named whales, are little fellows, and a layman would 

 doubtless call them all dolphins or porpoises — and be right, for 

 once. For dolphins or porpoises they are to the zoologist also. 

 In many ways conspicuous among them is the white whale of 

 Arctic waters. He is between sixteen and twenty feet long and, 



