Rorqual Whales Ashore.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 470, 10 May 1890, Page 6

Rorqual Whales Ashore.

By Phil Robinson.

What makes whales come on shore when they feel ill? In the ordinary course of conduct one would rather expect them to go home to their families, to be 1 coddled ’ and made much of till they got better. They are more likely, it would be thought, to obtain gruel and beef-tea and other seasonable attentions among their own relatives and friends in the sea than among human beings on the dry land. But they evidently do not argue in this way, for it is a curious fact that the inhabitants of the waters are all of them given to the strange habits of coming ashore to die.. It looks like suicide and may be. That beasts and birds in the same way go aside from their comrades to suffer the extreme trial of death is a pathetic and well-known fact. Sometimes, no doubt, their friends desert them. They feel that the companionship of an enfeebled individual is a possible source of danger; or, perhaps instinct teaches them thus to avoid the risks of infection. Or, again, it may be that the sight of death is intolerable to them, just as it has been and is to many savage tribes, who leave their dying to pass away in solitude, and will not remain to witness the last infirmity of man. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that in the animal world, as a rule, creatures go away and die by themselves, and that the water-folk commit what may be called suicide by leaving their own element) for one in which they cannot possibly live. A rorqual whale, very sick, came ashore the other day in a bay in the Orkneys, and was, of course, killed immediately. Nothing less could have been expected from fishermen. To them a whale is a wild oldbarrel. So the rorqual was promptly done to death, and bortled off. Not that rorquals are exceptionally remunerative. They are very big—sometimes even taking the liberty of being one hundred feet long—but the proportion of valuable contents is not at all commensurate to this ostentatious ' bulk. Moreover, they are of a particularly nimble kind, far more muscular than the ‘right’ whales, restless, and more dangerous to approach. So that they do not get so much hunted as the other species and rove all oceans with a fuller liberty than their ‘ sperm ’ or ‘ Greenland ’ cousins. Taking advantage of their comparative immunity, they range from the Arctic to the Antarctic Seas, from tho Atlantic to the Pacific, and disport themselves besides in all minor waters, not even scorning our own British strips of channel. During these expeditions in restricted water-ways they continually fall into trouble. Sometimes they enter a bay and cannot find their way out again ; at others they run aground on a shoal, or, it may be, get jammed between half-hidden rocks.

The truth is that the rorqual is a mighty fish-hunter, and, in spite of the popular superstition that a whale cannot swallow anything bigger than animalculai, their cavernous stomachs, when explored, have confessed sometimes to a luncheon off as many as eight hundred herrings and cod. Where these sociable fish escongregate, there the rorqual follows them, and the banks where theshoalsassembleare their regularhuntinggrounds. They have thus in a manner deserved the animosity of fishermen ; for afterall.it isonly human to look with hostility upon gigantic animals which devour in such a wholesale fashion the fish by which men earn their living. They are regarded as poachers, as the 4 vermin ’ of the sea-pre-serves, and great is the enthusiasm with which the voracious visitor is hunted and mighty the rejoicing over its destruction. When, therefore, as in the present case, a rorqual deliberately comes on shore and gives himself up to his enemies he excites little sympathy, even though he does happen bo be very sick.