WHITE WHALES IN CONFINEMENT. 363 



coast of Labrador are plentiful, and the object of a profitable fishery. 

 They abound in the Bering and Okhotsk Seas, and ascend the Yukon 

 River, Alaska, to a distance of seven hundred miles. The names in 

 use are beluga and whitefish among whalers, porpoise, dauphin blanc, 

 marsouin or marsoon in Canada, and keela luak with the Greenland 

 Eskimos " (Fisheries Industries). 



The white whale grows to be sixteen feet long; we never had 

 one over ten feet in length, but they were billed, showman fashion, 

 to be much longer. An adult will yield from eighty to one hundred 

 gallons of good whale oil, besides several gallons of more valuable 

 oil from the head which is used on clocks and watches under the 

 trade name of " porpoise-jaw oil," which is sent in a crude state to 

 manufacturers on Cape Cod, who refine it and free it from all tend- 

 ency to gum. The skins make a leather that is waterproof and 

 stands more hard service than any other known leather. Large 

 quantities of it are sent to England and made into " porpoise-hide 

 boots " for sportsmen, and in Canada the hides are converted into 

 mail bags. The flesh is eaten to some extent by the fishermen, fresh, 

 salted, and smoked. 



Zach. Coup said: "I have eaten the fresh steaks several times, 

 and found the meat a fair substitute for beef when the choice was 

 between fish and bacon as a continuous diet, down on the islands 

 where these three things were the only possible variation in the line 

 of animal food, and a very limited choice in the vegetable line, com- 

 prising dried beans and rice, for when I was with them there was 

 a scarcity of potatoes for seed, and canned goods had not attained 

 their present popularity, even if these poor fishermen had been able 

 to buy them." 



The fat, oily blubber is an overcoat, a nonconductor of heat, and 

 is between the muscle and the skin, as is largely the case with the 

 hog, and, like the latter animal, there is savory muscle which may 

 be cut into succulent steaks below it. 



At first the white whales were not in my care, but, being strange 

 animals, were watched with curiosity. The whale tank was as nearly 

 circular as a twenty-sided tank could be whose glass plates were 

 four feet wide with iron standards between, making a pool of about 

 thirty feet in diameter. The pool was of cement and tapered down 

 to an outlet about three feet below the floor, for drainage, and on 

 the floor the cement basin arose two and a half feet, while the panes 

 of one-inch glass were six feet high, with the water line two feet 

 below the top of the glass. This gave the spectators a view of the 

 animals below water, and of their backs as they came up to blow. 

 The white whale and the harbor porpoise (Phoccena brachycion), 

 known as the herring-hog, etc., do not make as much of a " spout " 



