FROM the company of hungry merciless Sharks and their relatives, an easy transition carries us to the largest of Ocean-inhabitants—the Whale.

Not that sharks and whales belong to the same division in the Animal Kingdom. Not that they have aught in common beyond the possession of great size and power. But because of that size and power, they naturally come together at the close of a sketch of Ocean Life.

Sharks, if not in every respect to be regarded as fully and entirely Fishes, are yet in most essentials “fish-like.” But Whales belong to a higher level.

When we reach Whales we leave lower animals behind us; we step upon the uppermost rungs of the Ladder of Life; we are in the society of Mammals.

At the bottom of that ladder we found microscopic beings, specks of living jelly, so minute as to be invisible, so primitive as to be without development, without separate organs. At the top of that ladder stands Man; far more than animal, by virtue of his mental and spiritual being; and yet an animal, by virtue of his bodily development.

The physical part of a man marks him as a Mammal. To Mammals belong all Quadrupeds; but not Birds, not Reptiles, not Fishes.

A whale is not a fish. He is a Mammal. He is warm-blooded. He breathes air through lungs. He—or rather, she—feeds the young of the race, as they are fed by quadrupeds and human beings on land. A whale-mother will fight to the death in defence of her little one.

Nor is the whale the only Mammal of ocean-waters. To this highest division of backboned creatures belong also the Porpoise, a near relative of the Whale; and the fierce Walrus, met often by Arctic travellers; and the gentle Seal, with its pathetic human eyes, and its warm soft coat, for the sake of which it suffers too frequently cruel treatment at the hand of man.

Many different kinds of whales inhabit the sea,—such as the Rorqual, the Hump-backed, the Ziphoid. The two which are most widely known, and which may be regarded as foremost though unconscious rivals in human favour, are—the Right Whale, of higher latitudes, and the Sperm Whale of tropical regions.

There is a Right Whale of Atlantic waters, closely related to the Right or Greenland Whale of Arctic Seas, though in some respects different. But the Greenland Whale may be taken as the typical specimen of its race.

And a mighty creature it is; often fifty feet, and sometimes sixty or seventy, in length. A ribbon passed belt-wise around that massive form, at its thickest, would need to be something like forty feet in length. So the Right Whale does not boast a slim waist.

The enormous head, with its capacious cavern of a mouth, takes up about one-third of the whole body.

An individual of this size weighs some seventy tons. And yet so light is its make—partly due to the construction of its bones, partly no doubt to its great lung capacity—that it actually weighs less than water, and can with the utmost ease float close to the surface.

Indeed, a Greenland whale seldom by choice wanders very far below. He much prefers to come up and breathe every ten or fifteen minutes; though, when fleeing from the deadly harpoon, he has been known to stay under water at a stretch more than three-quarters of an hour. But this is exceptional.

At the top of the head are a couple of “blow-holes,” through which, when he rises to the surface, he breathes.

In colouring he is black above, white below. A skin about one inch thick covers enormous masses of fat, more than a foot in thickness; a fine warm blanket to guard him from cold, but also, unfortunately for the whale, an attraction to human beings, for the sake of the oil which it yields. The outer skin is often thickly overgrown with masses of barnacles.

Perhaps the most singular thing about this great creature is that it has no teeth, and that it feeds in consequence upon the lightest possible fare.

In place of teeth, inside the mouth are massive fringes of whalebone plates, side by side, smooth on the outer side towards the lips, but covered within by long dense supplies of hair. Similar horny plates depend from the roof of the mouth. Since the plates of this “baleen,” as it is called, are often ten or twelve feet long, and amount in number to many hundreds, one cannot but imagine that the whale’s mouth must be packed unpleasantly full of furniture. But they have their use.

As he swims he holds his mouth habitually open—somewhat after the fashion of the Pelican-fish—and into the vast cave flow multitudes of small creatures of every kind and description.

Presently a good supply has been collected, all lying on the enormous tongue, a mass of flesh often as big as a room, some eighteen feet long by ten wide.

He then nearly closes his jaws, and forces out the water. But the dense hairy fringes hold back the living creatures, which he proceeds to swallow. After which he again goes forward, open-mouthed, as before.

In a good many respects the Sperm Whale is a contrast to the Greenland Whale.

He too is of leviathan-like dimensions; generally from sixty to seventy feet in length, and not more slender as to his waist. But only the male Sperm boasts these proportions. The female is, by comparison, a dainty little being, seldom more than thirty or thirty-five feet long.

A Sperm has one spout-hole, instead of two; and in colour he is black above, grey below.

In his outlines a marked difference is visible. Looked upon sideways, the form of the huge square head is precisely like the trunk of an immense forest tree, cut off short; and the “blow-hole” is situated close to the end or front of this “truncated” head. The latter is really a reservoir, containing a large supply of valuable spermaceti oil, for the sake of which the creature is killed by man.

Instead of a mouth full of hair-fringed “baleen,” these whales have proper teeth, better suited, one would think, to their size. Their food too is of a far more substantial kind.

It was told in an earlier chapter how Sperm Whales live mainly on cuttlefishes; and how sometimes, in midnight combat, they fight and conquer even the mightiest of those loathsome monsters of the deep.

Sperms are found through wide ranges of the ocean, in most tropical waters, as far north and as far south as 60° in each direction from the equator.

But whereas Right Whales of colder seas prefer to hunt in couples only, Sperm Whales crowd together in large companies. Sometimes, it is true, lonely specimens are found. They, however, are usually morose and ill-conditioned brutes, ready to fight even men. It has been suggested that perhaps they are thus solitary because of their morose temperament, which has made it impossible for their fellows to put up with their presence.

Both these huge whales have powerful fluked tails and small flippers. It is curious that inside the flippers are separate branching bones, not unlike the bones of a human hand, only covered with thick skin in one piece, like a fingerless glove.

This rather seems to indicate that the flippers may be of the nature of hands in embryo.

The Sperm does not come to the surface for air nearly so often as his Greenland cousin. Regularly once in each hour and ten minutes is the plan he follows; and then he remains for several minutes at the surface, going through a series of sixty or seventy mighty puffings and blowings. After which he vanishes for another hour and ten minutes.

Some pathetic tales have been told of the devotion of a mother-whale to her infant—she usually has but one at a time.

Early in the present century a harpooner deliberately sent his harpoon into an infant-whale, hoping thus to take the mother. And he had not miscalculated the strength of maternal love.

No thought had that poor mother of saving herself by flight. She came fearlessly close to the boat, seized her wounded little one, and dragged it away with extraordinary rapidity, using up six hundred feet of line.

Then she rose again, dashing to and fro in such evident “extreme agony” that one can only marvel at the men who were able to watch it unmoved. Two harpoons were flung at her, and failed to strike. A third succeeded; but still, absorbed in her little one’s peril, she paid no heed to her own injury, made no effort to get away, and “in the course of an hour” she was killed.

That was in 1811. The same deed has been lately described by Mr. Bullen—the slaying of a mother-whale, which, with her infant by her side, refused to use her great strength in self-defence, lest she might hurt that little one. Such love as this should surely be respected, even by rough fishermen.

If not in pity to the whale, another reason would suggest the same line of conduct. The folly of recklessly slaying the rising generation is beginning to be apparent. Already the supply of whales threatens to run short.

Although one may speak of “little ones,” and although they are genuinely “little,” compared with grown-up specimens, one must not be led astray by the term. One very young baby-whale, when measured, was found to be about twenty feet long. A fine strapping infant!