

COMMON F1M5ACK WHALE. 225 



Monday morning two large Finbacks were seen playing side by side in Provincetown harbor, 

 whereupon Capt. Cook of the bark Fairy, and Capt. Soper, late of the brig St. Thomas, manned 

 two boats and pounced upon the leviathans. . . . Capt. Cook gave his customer a harpoon 

 and a lance as quick as he could dart, and turned him up in about fifteen minutes. Capt. Soper 

 also fastened to the other, but so far aft as not to affect the vitals, in consequence of which he 

 could not get alongside to lance him. The whale ran his boat to Truro, and after cutting down 

 the chocks of the boat and making her leak, the line was cut and the whale went away with the 

 harpoon and about 50 fathoms of line." 



Such, therefore, was the uncertain and desultory manner in which the capture of the 

 Finback Whale was attempted on our coast previous to 1850. At about this time, however, 

 can ic the introduction of the whaling gun and the deadly bomb-lance, whose effectiveness caused 

 a short-lived revival of this industry here, with the Finback and Humpback as the special 

 objects of pursuit. About 1847, C. C. Brand, of Norwich, Connecticut, invented a harpoon 

 gun weighing from eighteen to twenty-three pounds, to be fired from the shoulder. The Nan- 

 tucket Inquirer, in that year mentions this weapon as a great innovation: "We saw yesterday 

 at the store of Captain E. W. Gardner a very curious contrivance for killing whales. It is a 

 short gun weighing some twenty-five pounds the stock being of solid brass from which a 

 harpoon is to be fired into the animal. The handle of the harpoon goes into the gun about a 

 foot, and a line is fastened to it, of course outside the gun, by which the whale is to be held. 

 There is also a bomb lance for the purpose of killing the animal. The instrument is loaded 

 with powder, and a slow match is led from the magazine to the end which goes into the gun. 

 When the lance is fired into the whale the slow match ignites; and in about half a minute the 

 fire reaches the powder which is in the head of the instrument, which instantly explodes, killing 

 the animal outright. At least, that is what the article is intended to do. The whole apparatus 

 is certainly very ingenious; whether or not it is really an improvement on the present mode 

 of killing whales is more than we are able to say. That is a question that must be settled by 

 the whalemen themselves." 



At about this time also, one Robert Allen, likewise of Norwich, Connecticut, invented a 

 bomb-lance to be fired from a shoulder gun. It was a long metal tube filled with powder, 

 \\hidi was exploded by means of a time fuse. This proved ineffective as well as dan- 

 gerous, because it lacked feathering of any sort to make it travel end on. This defect, how- 

 ever, was overcome by Brand, who in 1852, devised feathers of rubber, which were attached 

 at the proximal end and folded up when the lance was thrust into the gun. 1 This bomb-lance 

 \\ as simply shot into the whale, and no line was attached, so that if not immediately fatal 

 the whale made off, and might or might not be recovered. In case of the Finback Whale, 



1 Spears, J. R. The Story of the New England Whalers, New York, 1908, p. 220. 



