SHORE- WHALING : A WORLD INDUSTRY 



413 



A BLUE WHALE: VANCOUVER 



Although the mouth is enormous, large enough in fact to permit 10 or T2 men to stand upright 

 in it, the throat measures only about 9 inches in diameter ( see page 427) 



back whales are being taken in wire nets, 

 and so in nearly every part of the globe 

 the world-hunt goes on. 



And what is to be the result of this 

 wholesale slaughter ? Inevitably the com- 

 mercial extinction of the large whales, 

 and that within a very few decades. In 

 some localities this has already taken 

 place and all the whales have been killed 

 or driven from their feeding grounds. 



This method of capture has, however, 

 made possible a careful study by natu- 

 ralists of most of the species of large 

 whales and their habits, besides enabling 

 museums to secure skeletons and other 

 specimens for exhibition. Thus, when 

 the American Museum of Natural His- 

 tory in New York city began to gather 

 such material, it led to a series of expe- 

 ditions which carried the writer to a 

 number of stations in widely separated 

 parts of the world. 



THE ENORMOUS BODIES EASILY HANDLED 



I will never forget my intense surprise 

 at the extraordinary ease and quickness 

 with which the enormous carcasses are 

 handled when I first saw a whale "cut 

 in." It was at Sechart, in Barclay Sound, 

 on the west coast of Vancouver Island. 

 Here, as at all of the American stations, 

 the operations are carried on in the Nor- 

 wegian way. 



The ship had arrived at 1.30 a. m. 

 with three humpbacks, which were left 

 floating in the water, tied to the end of 

 the wharf, near a long inclined platform 

 called the "slip." Work began at seven 

 o'clock, and, as I had only just been 

 awakened, I ran out without waiting for 

 breakfast, thinking that there would be 

 ample time to eat when the operations 

 were under way. I soon learned, how- 

 ever, that there were no "breathing 



