276 The Sperm Whale and its Food 



An American fisherman from Antigua found some years ago, about 52 

 leagues south-east from the Windward Islands, a piece of ambergrise in a 

 whale, which weighed about 130 pounds, and sold for five hundred pounds 

 sterling. 



We are told by all writers on ambergrise, that sometimes claws and 

 beaks of birds, feathers of birds, parts of vegetables, shells, fish, and bones 

 of fish, are found in the middle of it, or variously mixed with it; but of a 

 very large quantity of pieces which I have seen, and which I have carefully 

 examined, I have found none that contained any such thing, though I do 

 not deny, that such substances may sometimes be found in it; but the 

 circumstances which to me seems to be the most remarkable, is, that in all 

 the pieces of ambergrise of any considerable size, whether found on the sea, 

 or in the whale, which I have seen, I have constantly found a considerable 

 quantity of black spots, which, after the most careful examination, appear 

 to be the beaks of the Sepia oclopodia. These beaks seem to be the sub- 

 stances which have hitherto been always mistaken for claws or beaks of 

 birds, or for shells. 



The persons who are employed in the spermaceti-whale fishery, confine 

 their views to the Physeter macrocephalus. They look for ambergrise in 

 all the spermaceti-whales they catch, but it seldom happens that they find 

 any. But whenever they discover a spermaceti-whale, male or female, 

 which seems torpid and sickly, they are always pretty sure to find amber- 

 grise. They likewise generally meet with it in the dead spermaceti-whales 

 which they sometimes find floating on the sea. 



It is observed also, that the whale, in which they find ambergrise, often 

 has a morbid protuberance ; or, as they express it, a kind of gathering in the 

 lower part of its belly, in which, if cut open, ambergrise is found. It is 

 observed, that all these whales, in whose bowels ambergrise is found, seem 

 not only torpid and sick, but are also constantly leaner than others; so that, 

 if we may judge from the constant union of these two circumstances, it 

 would seem that a larger collection of ambergrise in the belly of the whale 

 is a source of disease, and probably sometimes the cause of its death. 



As soon as they hook a whale of this description, torpid, sickly, 

 emaciated, they immediately either cut up the above-mentioned pro- 

 tuberance, if there be any, or they rip open its bowels from the orifice, 

 and find the ambergrise, sometimes in one, sometimes in different lumps of 

 generally from three to twelve and more inches in diameter, and from one 

 pound to twenty or thirty pounds in weight, at the distance of two, but 

 most frequently of about six or seven feet from the orifice, and never higher 

 up in the intestinal canal; which, according to their description, is, in all 

 probability, the intestinum caecum, hitherto mistaken for a peculiar bag 

 made by nature for the secretion and collection of this singular substance 1 . 



Having discovered, as I just now mentioned, beaks of the cuttle-fish 

 in all the pieces of ambergrise I had an opportunity of examining, it now 



1 It may be taken from this that the disease from which the ambergrise- 

 bearing whale suffers is allied to, if not identic with Appendicitis. 



