XOXES ON THE WHALES OF NORFOLK. 
305 
having come ashore at Holme on December 6th, 1626, and is 
recorded in MSS. notes kept by the Le Stranges, the skull of 
which is still in the courtyard at Hunstanton Hall. The base 
of a skull, known as the Whale Chair, is an object of interest 
in Yarmouth Church; for the painting of this, an item of five 
shillings is mentioned in the churchwardens’ accounts forl606. 
Browne, in a further note, refers to our Whale — “ I have 
still by me (he says) a little of the spermaceti of our Whale, 
as also the oil and balsam which I have made with the oil 
and spermaceti. Our Whale was worth £500 ; my apothecary 
got about £50 worth in one sale of a quantity of sperm.” 
Evidently our forefathers turned things to a better account 
than do we ; our Whales made a distraint upon the public 
purse for their burial. Surely a beast who is not too ripe 
might be turned to some useful account. Mr. Southwell 
gives a letter by Arthur Bacon, of Yarmouth, dated May, 
1652, describing the dissection of a Sperm. He says: — “I 
found no sperm but in the head, and that after I had taken 
off his skull — -one ton weight of a nexuous substance. We 
found in the circumference, as large as a small coach wheel 
in the middle part, certain round pieces of sperm as big as 
a man’s fist, some as large as eggs, and on the outside of 
the said rounds, flakes as large as a man’s head in form like 
honeycombs, being very white and full of oil,” &c., &c. 
Why Mr. Southwell elected to distinguish this species as 
the Northern Sperm Whale I am at a loss to know, for those 
which have been found in our Northern waters must have 
been stragglers carried northward by the gulf stream. It 
does not inhabit Polar seas. It was once much more 
plentiful, but persecution has made it rarer even in its 
favourite Pacific haunts. It was formerly hunted in the 
Bay of Bengal and around Ceylon. 
The Beaked, or Bottlehead Whale ( Hyperoodon 
rostratum ). The Pagets mention one caught in a herring 
net, November, 1816 ; and another 20 years before. Several 
