328 WHALING 



emergencies, whale meat has served as food but, on the other 

 hand, whalers of old days have faced starvation, to say nothing 

 of the almost kilHng monotony of '^salt horse" and ship's bread, 

 without a thought of the tons of fresh meat they were presenting 

 to the sharks with every flensed carcass they set adrift. This 

 seems to need some explanation. 



For the honour of the sperm whalers, be it said immediately 

 that sperm whale meat is indeed what the layman thinks all 

 whale meat must be: too oily to eat. But the right whale is 

 edible, though we have now very little chance to prove it, and 

 ignorance alone can account for the desperate plight into which 

 scurvy and the Arctic ice brought the old Greenland whalers. 



Why we have so strong an objection to eating whale meat to- 

 day is quite another question and one more embarrassing to 

 answer. There are three whales, the humpback, the finback, 

 and the sei, which are edible; together they form the bulk of the 

 animal food of the Japanese middle and lower classes, the meat 

 of the humpback being most highly esteemed. This we know; 

 but what ignorance cannot do, by way of perversity, pride and 

 prejudice evidently can. 



Our own Bureau of Fisheries spoke a good word for whale 

 meat in 1916, when the exigencies of war recommended all sorts 

 of strange new fuels, fabrics, and foods, and that year nearly a 

 thousand of the beasts were killed on the Pacific coast, each of 

 them supplying, besides oil and fertilizer, about seven tons of 

 food for humans. Undoubtedly time and experience could have 

 improved our results in this new industry, for various are the 

 reports, both of the work and of the whale as ''a table fish." Still, 

 the demand is said to have exceeded the supply, and the supply 

 increased — also the price, which began at ten cents the pound 

 and by 1919 had reached twenty-two and a half cents. 



Whale meat certainly has much to recommend it. First of 

 all, it comes from an animal of cleanly habits and clean habitat, 

 a beast free from disease of any sort. It is inexpensive and there 

 is almost no waste. Also it is highly digestible. All of which 

 would be but useless praise if the meat were not palatable, but 

 it is. In the opinion of most experimenters, it much resembles 



