196 ALLEN: NEW ENGLAND WHALEBONE WHALES. 



Piked Whale, or Right Whale. Possibly it is at times chased by the relentless Killer Whales 

 or Orcas into shallow water. In many cases Finbacks have drifted ashore that were killed 

 at sea, but numerous instances have occurred in which the stranding of unhurt individuals 

 has come about through accident. Most commonly these fatalities result from the whale 

 having come close in to the shore, when a falling tide has left it stranded, or has cut off escape 

 by lowering the water through the channel whence it entered some bay or harbor. 



Captain N. E. Atwood writing from Provincetown, says, "I have known two of this spe- 

 cies to rim on shore in the night, in our harl^or, and be left liy the receding tide. Wlien they 

 were killed there appeared to be no indications of disease, and the cause of their running on 

 the beach could not be learned." ^ 



The Nantucket Inquirer of August 10, 1833, contains a note on the stranding of a "large 

 Finback" off Whitehead Light, Maine, as witnessed by persons on the schooner Experimenl 

 bound from Salem to Northport. "The whale ran upon the rocks near the light, and after 

 floundering some time, slipped ofT and came close to the schooner, evidently not a little agi- 

 tated, throwing himself out of the water as he approached, and giving the vessel a sensible 

 shock." In this case it would seem that the whale had come upon submerged rocks of which 

 it had no warning and had been carried on to them by its momentum. 



Mr. Roscoe C. Emery has kindly written out for me a short account of the accidental 

 stranding of a Finback Whale on January 17th, 1912, near Eastport, Maine. The whale "had 

 been in Cobscook Bay, but instead of returning to open water by swinmiing down the Lubec 

 shore, chose to pass by the shallow channel north of this island (Eastport) between it and the 

 mainland of Perry. In doing so it entered a pool blocked at one entrance by a railroad bridge 

 and obstructed at the other by a sandbar. This sandbar, while covered at high water by a 

 depth of perhaps ten to twelve feet, is left bare by the ebbing tide, and when the tide dropped 

 kept the whale prisoner. Here it was noticed by two Indians, who waited until the receding 

 tide left the whale stranded, when they dispatched it with bullets and harpoons." Probably 

 the whale had been following a school of herring, and so had been lured in to the shore waters. 

 At all events, a herring was found entangled in its baleen. 



It is rarely that a large whale becomes entangled in a fish net, though this does occasion- 

 ally happen, and on the Japan coast great nets are regularly used in the capture of Right 

 Wliales. The Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror (vol. 86, no. 23, June 23, 1906) gives an account 

 of the adventure that befell one Henry S. Whorf of the mackerel drift-netter Letha May, who 

 one night in mid-June, in his dory was tending the nets that stretched from the sloop's bow 

 fully a mile into Provincetown Bay. The whale, probably a Finback, struck the net near 

 Whorf 's dory and becoming "enwrapped in countless thousands of three-inch meshes of 



' In Allen, J. A. Mammalia of Massachusetts. Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., 1869, vol. 1, p. 204. 



