288 
FOREST AND S T R E A M 
May, 1918 
A SPERM WHALE ASHORE NEAR NEW YORK 
SCIENTIFIC INTEREST CENTERS IN A FULL GROWN SPECIMEN OF THE MUCH PRIZED SPERM 
WHALE OF THE NEW ENGLAND FISHERMEN RECENTLY GROUNDED ON THE LONG ISLAND BEACH 
A T two o’clock in the morning of Febru¬ 
ary 28, 1918, a patrol from the Gov¬ 
ernment Coast Guard Station on the 
Great South Beach opposite Bellport, Long 
Island, was attracted by the floundering 
and splashing of a great creature at the 
water’s edge. The animal, a veritable levi¬ 
athan, could not be distinguished clearly in 
the darkness, but it was fast aground, with 
the tide receding. It was probably suffo¬ 
cated by its own weight as soon as it lost 
the support of the water, for by daybreak 
it was dead, high and dry on the beach. It 
proved to be one of the least common of 
large cetaceans in waters near New York— 
a sperm whale. 
News of the stranded whale finally 
reached me by telephone, and early on 
March first I arrived at Bellport. A very 
dense fog, combined with an unaccountable 
scarcity of mariner’s compasses, made the 
baymen with whom I tried to negotiate un¬ 
willing to ferry me over the ice-filled bay in 
a “scooter”—one of those flat, amphibious 
sailboats peculiar to Long Island, which are 
equally at home on the ice or in the water. 
So I was obliged to make the long land 
trip to the beach by way of Smith’s Point. 
The whale, which lay half buried in the 
sand, was a full-grown female sperm whale, 
approximately thirty-nine feet long. In 
bulk it was hardly more than a third of 
what a bull sperm whale might be expected 
to attain, but for a cow whale it averaged 
up well. In the hands of trained whalemen 
its blubber would have yielded about 650 
gallons of oil, which would have a market 
value of something over $300. The meat 
and bones would have an additional value 
of perhaps $150 for the manufacture of 
fertilizer. The Bellport life-guards had 
opened the huge “case” of spermaceti in 
the whale’s great blunt head, and had bailed 
out about two barrels of the limpid, valuable 
oil, besides which they had stripped off a 
good portion of the blubber, which had a 
maximum thickness of five inches, from the 
upper part of the carcass. They were pre¬ 
paring to “try out” the oil from this in an 
iron pot on the beach. They had spoiled 
their chances of selling the skeleton to a 
museum by hacking off one flipper and the 
lower jaw with an ax, but some of them 
were making a perfunctory search for am¬ 
bergris in the whale’s intestines. They 
were keenly interested to learn that a ton 
of ambergris is worth close to a million 
dollars, but the search through a lone whale 
might have lost some of its zest had they 
realized that probably less than two tons 
of this precious perfume-mordant have been 
found during all the centuries that the sub¬ 
stance has been known to men. 
HE Natural History Department 
has been for nearly half a 
century a clearing-house for infor¬ 
mation of interest to all. Our read¬ 
ers are invited to send any questions 
that come under the head of this de¬ 
partment to Robert Cushman Mur¬ 
phy, in care of Forest and Stream. 
Mr. Murphy, zvho is Curator of the 
Department of Natural Science of 
the Brooklyn Museum, will ansiver 
through these columns. [Editors.] 
The sperm whale is the only large whale 
that has teeth; it is this feature, in fact, 
which distinguishes it sharply from the 
several species of whalebone whales. Ac¬ 
cording to most of the natural history 
books, the sperm whale’s teeth are confined 
to its narrow, lower jaw, but it has been 
known to whalers for two hundred years 
or more that there are also teeth partly or 
completely buried in the gum of the upper 
jaw. The Bellport whale, for instance, had 
no less than twelve misshapen teeth, about 
two inches in length and with closed pulp 
cavities, projecting slightly from the sockets 
in the upper jaw into which the larger, 
lower teeth fit when the mouth is closed. 
On the left side of the creature’s upper jaw, 
these curved, nearly obsolete teeth were 
distributed between the eighth and eigh¬ 
teenth sockets. 
The whale’s stomach was entirely empty, 
and it is not unlikely that'the animal was 
sick when it came ashore. The latter sup¬ 
position alone kept the Bellport guards 
from feasting upon its flesh, for they would 
have liked to serve it in the Government 
House after the recent notoriety that 
“whale luncheons” have enjoyed. The 
writer has many times dined upon sperm 
whale meat and has found it good eating, 
especially when cooked in the form of 
“Hamburg steak.” It is admittedly inferior 
to humpback whale flesh, however, being 
rather oily, and in Japan, where whale meat 
is almost a staple food, the sperm whale 
brings the lowest price and is eaten only by 
the poorer classes. In this connection it 
is worthy of note that the humpback feeds 
exclusively upon crustaceans—free-swim¬ 
ming shrimps—which ought to make its 
flesh palatable if an animal’s food has any 
influence in this respect. The sperm whale 
eats chiefly squid. I have seen a medium¬ 
sized bull belch up seventy-five or a hun¬ 
dred squids while it was being lanced by 
New Bedford whalemen. 
From the point of view of the old Amer¬ 
ican whalemen, who did their hunting from 
thirty-foot boats and struck their prey with 
hand-harpoons, the sperm whale differed 
from all other whales in that “it fought 
with both ends,” i.e., both jaw and flukes, 
whereas the others were dangerous only 
when they could bring their thrashing tails 
into play. A sperm whale has no choice: 
he will shiver your boat with a gentle tap 
of his flukes, or bite it in half with his 
scissor-like jaw. If sufficiently enraged he 
may even sink your staunch two-hundred 
ton bark with the great battering ram of his 
square, slightly lop-sided head. Sperm 
whales are tenacious fighters, especially the 
half-grown bulls. On October 9, 1912, a 
memorable day to me, I was a member of 
the crew of a whaleboat which struck a 
“forty-barrel bull,” that is, a whale which 
subsequently yielded forty barrels of sperm 
oil. It happened just north of th'e equator, 
and we planted our harpoon about nine 
o’clock in the morning. All day long, over 
a choppy ocean, sometimes right through 
great schools of whales, our lively young 
bull kept six of us straining at the line, 
and it was not until the end of nine hours’ 
toil that we finally lanced it to death. 
The commonest whale along the Long 
Island coast in winter has, until recent 
years, been the Atlantic right whale. At 
Amagansett and the Hamptons the right¬ 
whaling equipment stiff stands ready for 
service on the beach, and as late as 1907 
important catches were made. At other 
seasons hunipbacks sometimes pass up and 
down the coast, and the swift, slender fin¬ 
back whales feed regularly offshore in sum¬ 
mer. In July, 1916, six finbacks came in¬ 
side the inlet of Jamaica Bay and one of 
them, which measured fifty feet in length, 
was stranded on a bar and soon killed by 
the swarms of people that flocked to it in 
launches, sailboats, rowboats, and even by 
swimming. This unfortunate creature was 
afterwards covered with a tent into which 
its alleged owners charged ten cents ad¬ 
mission until the board of health compelled 
the removal of the great carcass. * 
Sperm whales are now rather rare in this 
latitude, although in the early days of 
American whaling they were taken not in¬ 
frequently in Long Island and New Eng¬ 
land waters. They are primarily warm- 
water mammals, and they seldom occur in 
winter anywhere north of Cape Hatteras. 
The Bellport whale may possibly have been 
making an unusually early northward mi¬ 
gration in order to give .birth to her calf, 
when she ran onto the treacherous sand 
bars of the south shore and came to an un¬ 
timely end. R. C. M. 
