306 LABRADOR 
junct to the diet of all. The poor people especially weleome 
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. 
