356 LABRADOR 



junct to the diet of all. The poor people especially welcome 

 this meat, for it is scarcely more expensive than the can it 

 is put into. Preserved frozen for winter, whalefish would 

 help to prevent the scurvy, which often affects the people 

 in spring after the long winter of isolation. 



The white whale is a slender, graceful animal about 

 twenty feet long. His skin forms excellent leather, called 

 " porpoise hide"; it is very impervious to water. The 

 adult is as big as two dozen calves. He weighs about 

 twenty-five hundred pounds, and gives one hundred gallons 

 of oil. These whales were very common in the Gulf of St. 

 Lawrence, and are still found there. They play in schools, 

 jumping out of the water, enjoying life much like porpoises. 

 They have been caught in cod-trap nets, getting tangled 

 up in the twine, and in 1907 some sixty were caught in the 

 big seal-nets set at Cape Chidley by the Moravian mis- 

 sionaries. They are voracious beasts, eating alive almost 

 every kind of fish in the sea. They even kill and eat our 

 seals. But the white whale is paid back in his own coin by 

 the much more powerful threshers, who are very partial 

 to his flesh. 



The thresher, or killer whale (Orca gladiator) , is himself 

 only twenty feet in length, but he is the fiercest of all our 

 sea animals, and is a perfect buccaneer and pirate. He has 

 a back fin about six feet long which reveals his presence as 

 he swims along near the surface. With it he is said by 

 some to beat his prey. Many are the battles that have been 

 described between this beast and his larger kindred. 

 Captain Atwood tells of three attacking an enormous cow 

 sperm whale and her huge offspring in shallow water. They 

 killed the calf and drove off the mother, badly wounded, 

 after which they came back and ate the baby. 



