Which harpooner helped kill the whale

Before deciding to follow and then try to kill this bowhead whale, hunters had previously followed another bowhead whale — that is, until they realized the whale was a female and travelling with a young calf.

To avoid the meat from spoiling, as some portions did last year, the butchering was done as close to the hunting site as possible. The first thing removed from the whale was its guts, because they retain too much heat inside the animal, Cormier said.

Depending on the part of the whale being butchered, pieces were then cut into different sized cubes and packaged in plastic containers or barrels to be shipped out by boat or plane.

The only indication of the age of the whale so far is a bullet found in the animal, which is estimated to be at least years old, he said. As the hunters from the different villages left after the all the work was done, flares were set off to celebrate their participation in the hunt and send them home safely.

Harpoon it. The whale keeps the barnacle safe. A killer whale is a toothed whale in the oceanic dolphin family delphinidae. Some small types of whale e. Log in. Endangered, Vulnerable, and Threatened Species. Study now. See Answer. Best Answer. Study guides. Endangered, Vulnerable, and Threatened Species 24 cards. What is the driest place on earth. With respect to matter Earth is mostly an system With repect to energy Earth is mostly an system. What percent of the world is Tropical rain forests.

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Write your answer Related questions. Why is the narwhal whale endangered? Can any animal kill a whale? Who was the only whale author Ishmael described who was a real professional harpooneer and whaleman? They faced the stern rear of the boat and the boatheader a mate or the captain , who steered the boat, urged the men to row harder. He coaxed and commanded them to strain every muscle as they surged forward. For all hands, especially the inexperienced, it was a tense moment as the small, fragile whaleboat drew up to the unpredictable and enormous mammal.

It was not simply a matter of rowing fast, reaching the whale, and making a kill. Whales have acute hearing, so it was important to approach quietly. Whenever there was a favorable wind, the crew attached a rudder and put up mast and sail.

If they could not sail, they rowed. Sometimes, as they drew close to the whale, they quietly paddled the boat like a canoe. As the whaleboat glided closer, the harpooneer picked up his weapon. It was designed to penetrate blubber and hold securely, like a hook. A whaleship embarking on a four-year voyage in the mid- nineteenth century usually carried harpoons.

The harpoon was a forged iron head mounted to a hardwood shaft five or six feet long. The blunt end of the harpoon was attached to a long coil of line in a bucket. Although blacksmiths and harpooneers experimented with many different barbs, swivels, and toggles in designing harpoon heads, the standard, hand-darted harpoon in the second half of the nineteenth century was the toggle iron designed by an African-American in New Bedford, Lewis Temple. The harpooneer stood at the bow front , bracing his leg against the thighboard, weapon in hand, poised for action.

At this moment of danger, the crew backed the boat away, as the whale thrashed in pain. The jaws or tail of a ton whale could smash a boat and send the crew tumbling into the water. In rough seas or fog, losing the whaleboat was a death sentence, if the ship could not find the scattered crew.

The whale usually dove, taking down with it the embedded harpoon. The crew allowed the line to run out to prevent the boat from being dragged down with the whale. The line was turned around a small post called a loggerhead, to slow it down as it ran out. As the whale pulled the boat, the line often played out so fast that it smoked from the friction. If the line became fouled, the boat could be dragged underwater.

A seaman caught in the rushing line could be pulled from the boat. When the whale came up to breathe, it often swam on the surface, at speeds of over twenty miles per hour for a sperm whale.

The whaleboat, attached to the prey by harpoon and line, bounced along, showering the men with spray. The danger was very real that the crew might be carried so far from the ship that it could not find them again.

The kill: When the whale tired, the crew pulled on the line to draw the boat close to their prey, while boatheader and harpooneer changed places — a hazardous maneuver that led to more than one death. The harpooneer went aft to the back to steer, while the boatheader carried a lance forward and plunged it into a vulnerable spot, such as the heart or lungs.

With each breath, the whale spouted blood. As the whaleboat backed off again, the crew observed the awesome spectacle of the death of the whale. After hours of tremendous exertion, the whaleboat crew still had work to do.

The dead whale, often weighing more than 50 tons, had to be towed back to the ship by a handful of exhausted men, unless the ship could sail to it. Not all pursuits ended in the death of the whale. Crews sometimes chased for hours and never got close to their prey.

Occasionally, the harpooneer might not make a firm hit and the whale would escape, or the whaleboat would be overturned by a whale or a storm. Throughout the nineteenth century, whalemen sought to improve their methods of capturing whales by perfecting better weapons.

The explosive weapons were intended to slow the whale down and weaken its ability to struggle against its captors. Explosive devices were particularly popular in the Arctic fishery, where it was important to prevent the whale from diving under the ice. If the wind was favorable, the whaleship sailed to where the carcass floated in the sea.

Cutting In It was important to process the whale quickly to prevent sharks from feasting on too much of the valuable carcass. The crew, divided into two watches, worked six-hour shifts, day and night, until the job was done. The process could take from several hours to several days, depending on the size of the whale, the skill of the crew, and the weather. The whale was made fast to the starboard right side of the ship with heavy chains.

The crew erected the cutting stage plank platform above the carcass and:. The precious head The head of the sperm whale was very valuable. It was separated into three parts:. Baleen Unlike sperm whales, all baleen whales, such as bowhead and right whales, do not have teeth. Instead, they use long vertical strips in their mouths, called baleen, to strain ocean water for krill, masses of shrimp-like organisms that float near the surface.

Baleen is made of keratin, a substance found in nails, horns, hoofs, and hair. It was used for:. Dangerous even in death Processing a whale was nearly as dangerous as hunting one. The deck became so slick with blood and oil that a man could slip overboard to the sharks below.

Others were crushed by the enormous weight of strips of blubber or wounded by cutting tools. As the blubber was being rendered in the tryworks, a wave sometimes rocked the ship and splashed scalding oil onto the crew. On rare occasions, the fire in the tryworks spread and devastated the ship.

And throughout the days and nights of work, an unforgettable stench clung to the men and their ship. The big cleanup After the last cask was stowed in the hold, the crew scrubbed and polished until the ship was once again as clean as it could be, considering that the inescapable odor of smoked blubber could never be eradicated.

It was said that a ship downwind could smell a whaleship coming. And begin again: As the cleanup ended, lookouts were sent up to the mastheads to watch for whales. Beginning in the s, the Norwegian sealing captain-entrepreneur Svend Foyn pioneered revolutionary methods for hunting and processing whales.

Instead of the rickety, old fashioned sail- and oar-powered whaleboats favored by traditional Yankee whalers, Foyn introduced mechanized, steam-powered catcher boats equipped with bow-chaser deck cannons and heavy-caliber harpoons that exploded on impact.

These increased efficiency and volume, enabling the harvest not only of all of the species that had been hunted for centuries notably, Northern and Southern right whales, sperm whales, Arctic bowheads, humpbacks, and gray whales , but also blue whales and finbacks—the largest species, which, by reason of their speed in the water, had eluded all previous hunting technologies.

The Norwegians first exploited their own coastal waters. Later, between and , they established shore-whaling stations on six continents including on the American Northwest Coast and pioneered pelagic factory-ship expeditions to the vast, hitherto unexploited grounds of Antarctica, employing entire fleets or a dozen or more vessels for months-long voyages to high South Latitudes.

Many technological innovations followed, including stern slipways on factory-ships for hauling entire carcasses aboard, integrated fleets of vessels with specialized tasks of catching, towing, processing, and bunkering, spotter aircraft and radio communications to track migrating whales, and remarkable advances in ordnance, food chemistry, and processing machinery. Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, China, Korea, Argentina, and Japan followed Norway into pelagic factory-ship whaling; two factory-ships partly owned in the United States and technically registered at Wilmington, Delaware which had also briefly been a conventional whaling port in the s , were also sent whaling in Antarctica in the s.

It was this relentlessly efficient technology, and the failure of the whaling nations to adhere to protective quotas regulating the catch, that in the decades following World War II devastated several species to the point of extinction. International treaties were negotiated in the s to regulate the hunt, and the International Whaling Commission was established in , with an expert Scientific Committee to monitor population and abundance.

However, lack of enforcement authority, inherent administrative flaws, and persistent international disputes, combined with clandestine over-fishing and under-reporting of the catch notably by the Soviet Union , fatally weakened IWC effectiveness.

Nevertheless, some nations have resumed limited whaling outside the jurisdiction of the IWC taking species that are not generally considered to be critically endangered.

The condition of several species — the North Atlantic right whale, the Arctic bowhead, and the Pacific blue whale — remains critical. Ash, Christopher. Modern whaling narrative of the British floating-factory whaleship Balaena.

Elliott, Sir Gerald. Kendall Monograph Sharon, Massachusetts, The History of Modern Whaling.