THE OCEAN MAMMALS 355 
The jaw-bone may be sixteen to eighteen feet long. It took 
four of us a whole afternoon, with axes and swords mounted 
on pike handles, to cut out one bone and carry it to our 
steamer. One had to walk almost in the footsteps of Jonah 
to get at the articulation, so far back is it in the body. 
Yet the gullet of this whale, where full-grown, is only a few 
inches in diameter. In reality, his mouth is a vast trap 
for food, the more of which is caught the larger the mouth is 
developed. Their food is very simple, being almost entirely 
small crustaceans of the shrimp variety which they sieve 
out of the deep water as they swim along. Occasionally 
they swallow a caplin or herring, which gets in the way. 
No whale is ever killed in a starved condition, not even a 
blind one, of which several have been captured. 
The finback is the commonest whale on the coast. He 
runs only to about sixty-five feet in length, and in proportion 
gives less oil than the sulphur-bottom. The humpback is, 
at times, scarcely worth catching, giving very little oil. 
He may be seventy to seventy-five feet long, and has bone 
up to three feet in length. When freshly killed, the young 
humpback affords excellent food for man. Indeed, were 
it not for the prejudice against them, these ‘‘mountains of 
meat’’ would be considered a most desirable food-supply. 
A few of us on the coast have used it, fresh, salted, and 
tinned. It is too hard in salt, but, tinned, is really good 
meat, with not enough characteristic qualities for the or- 
dinary man to tell it from tinned beef. The tinning, as an 
industry, seems to be abandoned, but in a country where 
vegetables are absent, cattle impossible, and our wild meat 
supplies diminishing with the years, the immense amount 
of nourishing material would seem a most desirable ad- 
