WHALE HUNTING WITH GUN AND CAMERA 



favor the giant squid and cuttlefish on which it lives, 

 and although it has been taken as far north as the 

 Aleutian Islands, Alaska, even there it is in the com- 

 paratively warm waters of the Japanese stream; it 

 has also been captured in the sub-Antarctic near the 

 Falkland Islands. 



The squid reach a length of twenty feet or more and 

 the whale sometimes has terrific battles with its huge 

 prey, the tentacles of which, armed with deadly suck- 

 ers, tear long gashes in the skin of the head and snout, 

 leaving white scars crisscrossed in every direction. In 

 Japan I took several enormous spiny lobsters from the 

 stomach of a sperm whale, as well as the remains of a 

 shark and seventy or eighty yellow parrot-like beaks 

 of the cuttlefish. 



Unlike the whalebone whales, of which the opposite 

 is true, the male sperm is very much larger than the 

 female, and an old bull will sometimes reach a length 

 of seventy feet and weigh eighty or ninety tons. Such 

 an animal is a truly colossal creature. The head of a 

 sixty-foot sperm, which was killed by Captain Fred 

 Olsen in Japan especially for the American Museum, 

 was almost twenty feet in length, and the skull, when 

 crated, had a space measurement of twenty-six tons; 

 it was so large that it would barely pass through the 

 main hatch of the steamship which carried it to New 

 York. 



The sperm has only a single S-shaped blowhole situ- 

 ated almost at the end of the snout on the left side, 

 and its spout, which is like that of no other whale, 

 may be easily recognized even at a considerable dis- 



230 



