Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [15]
The whaling trade had evolved over thousands of years, having begun with the harvesting of stranded whales. Whales have always inexplicably beached themselves, and once out of their element, they can't survive for long. Exposed fully to the sun, their skin burns, and they are crushed by their own weight. "When the flesh has moldered away, the skeletons are left, which the inhabitants of these shores use for building their houses," explains a perhaps fanciful account from the time of Alexander the Great. "The large bones at the side form the beams of their houses, the smaller ones the lathes. From the jawbones they make doors." Whether or not people made houses of whalebone, those living along protected bays throughout the world cut up the carcasses for food and rendered the fat to use for fuel and lubricants. What remained after the harvest they let wash away with the tide.
As the demand for blubber and whalebone grew, men took to their boats and forced the whales toward shore. "When they come within our harbors, boats surround them," one early New Englander wrote. "They are as easily driven to the shore as cattle or sheep are driven on land. The tide leaves them, and they are easily killed." This method of herding whales was never as effective as harpooning them, a practice that the Basques along the Bay of Biscay undertook as early as the tenth century. In time, harpooning became the favored method for hunting whales throughout the world.
Early whalers eagerly took any whale they encountered, though by the eighteenth century they were on the hunt for Eubalaena glacialis, the North Atlantic right whale, and Eubalaena australis, the southern right whale—so named because they were the right whales to hunt. Their blubber yielded good-quality oil, they were slow moving enough to be harpooned, and they floated after death—unlike the blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, which swam too fast for harpooners to reliably capture them and, if struck, invariably sank upon dying. The right whale—black, with white patches on its belly and callosities mottling its face—possesses a massive broad back; the Japanese call it semi kujira, meaning "beautiful-backed whale." It can reach sixty feet in length and weigh more than eighty tons. "The respiratory canal is over 12 inches in diameter," observed William Davis, "through which the rush of air is as noisy as the exhaust-pipe of a thousand-horse-power steam engine; and when the fatal wound is given, torrents of clotted blood are sputtered into the air over the nauseated hunters.... [Yet] the right whale has an eye scarcely larger than a cow's, and an ear that would scarcely admit a knitting needle."
As for the blubber, or blanket, of the whale, Davis suggested that it could "carpet a room 22 yards long and 9 yards wide, averaging half a yard in thickness." He continued: "The lips and throat ... should yield 60 barrels of oil, and, with the supporting jaw-bones, will weigh as much as twenty-five oxen of 1,000 pounds each. Attached to the throat by a broad base is the enormous tongue, the size of which can be better conceived by the fact that 25 barrels of oil have been taken by one. Such a tongue would equal in weight ten oxen."
Old Norse legend has it that for all its bulk, the right whale "subsists wholly on mist and rain and whatever falls into the sea from the air above." It could seem so, as it plows through the ocean's surface, taking in gray-green water swarming with krill, plankton, and schooling fish. The right whale is a filter feeder: it strains seawater through the hairy fringes of its comblike baleen plates—"that wondrous Venetian blind," Melville called them—which every day capture more than a ton of small and microscopic sea life. The plates—each up to seven feet long—hang from its upper jaw, and there are more than two hundred pairs