HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN WHALE FISHERY. 157 



wide at the bottom, 2 feet wide at the peak, and 20 feet long, aud will 

 convey an idea of the upper jaw, the saw-log and slanting supports rep- 

 resenting the bone. * * * These walls of bone are clasped by the 

 white, blubbery lips, which at the bottom are 4 feet thick, tapering to a 

 blunt edge, where they fit into a rebate sunk in the upper jaw. The 

 throat is 4 feet thick, and is mainly blubber, interpenetrated by fibrous, 

 muscular flesh. The lips aud throat of a 250-barrel whale should yield 

 60 barrels of oil, and, with the supporting jaw-bones, will weigh as 

 much as twenty-tive oxen of 1,000 pounds each. Attached to the throat 

 by a broad base is the euormous tongue,* the size of which can be bet- 

 ter conceived »by the fact that 25 barrels of oil have been taken from 

 one. iSuch a tongue would equal in weight ten oxen. The spread of 

 lips, as the whale plows through the fields of ' brit,'t is about 30 feet. 

 Sometimes in feeding the whale turns on its side, so as to lay the 

 longer axis of the cavity of the mouth horizontally. Keeping the lower 

 lip closed, and the upper one thrown off, and standing perpendicularly, 

 it scoops along just under the surface, where the ' brit' is always most 

 densely packed. After thus sifting a track of the sea 15 feet wide and 

 a quarter of a mile in length, the water foaming through the slatted 

 bone, and packing the mollusks upon the hair-sieve, the whale raises 

 the lower jaw ; but still keeping the lips apart, it forces the spongy 

 tongue into the cavity of the sieve, driving the water with great force 

 through the spaces between the bone. Then, closing the lips, it disposes 

 of the catch, and repeats the operation until satiated. * * * The 

 tail of such a whale is about 25 feet broad and 6 feet deep, and is con- 

 siderably more forked than that of the spermaceti. The point of junc- 

 ture with the body is about 4 feet in diameter, the vertebra about 15 

 inches; the remainder of the small being packed with rope-like ten- 

 dons from the size of a finger to that of a man's leg. The great rounded 

 joint at the base of the skull gleams like an ivory sphere, nearly as 

 large round as a carriage-wheel. Through the greatest blood-vessels, 

 more than a foot in diameter, surges, at each pulsation of a heart as 

 large as a hogshead, a torrent of barrels of blood heated to 104°. The 

 respiratory canal is over 12 inches in diameter, through which the rush 

 of air is as noisy as the exhaust-pipe of a thousand-horsepower steam- 

 engine; and when the fatal wound is given, torrents of clotted blood 

 are spattered into the air over the nauseated hunters. In conclusion, 

 the right whale has an eye scarcely larger than a cow's, and an ear that 

 would scarcely admit a knitting-needle." 



* This tongue and throat afford the most vulnerable point of attack to the killer- 

 whales and sharks. 



tThis "brit" consists of little reddish, shrimp-shaped medusas, which occur in pro- 

 digious numbers in various parts of the ocean, where they are carried by the currents. 

 So numerous are they that Scoresby estimates that an area of two square miles con- 

 tains 23,888,000,000,000,000 individuals. These being dependent upon the action of 

 currents for their means of locomotion, Commodore Wilkes was led to locate upon his 

 charts those places which would necessarily become the natural feeding-grounds of the 

 whales, and hence the localities where they would be more certainly captured. 



