124 WHALING 



Mack, to name a few from many, were entered as evidence. 

 They discussed the problem, as WilHam Sampson remarks on 

 the title page of his report of the case, ''theologically, scholas- 

 tically, and historically." There is, however, reason to doubt 

 that they argued it seriously. 



That, in the usual language of the trade, ''fish oil" meant the 

 oil from the livers of cod, haddock, pollock, sharks, mackerel, 

 and other fish, as opposed to whale oil, most witnesses agreed; 

 and the cross-examination of various witnesses established the 

 fact that "elephant oil" came from a creature neither fish nor 

 whale. But whether oil was made from the liver of the whale 

 appears doubtful, and one witness, Thomas Hazard, who had 

 been whaling for nearly thirty years, went so far as to declare 

 himself uncertain whether whales had livers at all. Hence a 

 distinction was made, to the satisfaction of all, between the 

 particular fish oil known to commerce as "liver oil," and sperm 

 or whale oil. 



The attorneys for the plaintiff, however, were of no mind to 

 let the matter rest there. They contended that in the generally 

 accepted use of the word, whales were fish, and hence that whale 

 oil was fish oil, regardless of the more precise definition, and 

 equally regardless of the testimony summed up in one dealer's 

 statement that he would no sooner send whale oil to a customer 

 ordering fish oil than he would send molasses to a customer 

 ordering sugar. They elicited from certain luckless witnesses 

 curious and original distinctions between whales and fishes, 

 and hurled upon the head of the learned chief witness for the 

 defense a series of questions so annoying that he protested to 

 the court against being "catechised and questioned like a 

 college candidate." One whaleman and oil dealer of long ex- 

 perience, bearing the singularly felicitous name of Captain Pre- 

 served Fish, declared that a whale had no character of a fish 

 except that it lived in the water. And after a lively cross- 

 examination, in which he asserted that the whale had arms 

 rather than fins, that its tail was flat, that it swam like a man, 

 that it could not breathe with its nose under water, and, 

 finally, that both whale and porpoise were mammals, he ex- 



