File:New Bedford, Massachusetts - its history, industries, institutions, and attractions (1889) (14781191594).jpg

Identifier: newbedfordmassac00peas (find matches)
Title: New Bedford, Massachusetts : its history, industries, institutions, and attractions
Year: 1889 (1880s)
Authors: Pease, Zeph. W. (Zephaniah Walter), b. 1861 New Bedford Board of Trade Hough, George A Sayer, William L. (William Lawton), 1848-1914
Subjects: Industries -- Massachusetts New Bedford New Bedford (Mass.) -- History
Publisher: (New Bedford, Mass.) : Published by order of the Board of Trade
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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^ feet in length for the ridgepole of the room we propose to build: then raise it in the air fifteenfeet, and support it with pieces of timber seventeen feet long, spread,say, nine feet. This will make a room nine feet wide at the bottom,two feet wide at the peak, and twenty feet long, and will convev anidea of the upper jaw, the saw-log and slanting supports representingthe bone. * * * These walls of bone are clasped bv the whiteblubbery lips, which at the bottom are four feet thick, tapering to ablunt edge, where they fit into a rebate sunk in the upper jaw. Thethroat is four feet thick, and is mainly blubber, interpenetrated byfibrous, muscular flesh. The lips and throat of a two-hundred-and-
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THE WHALE-FISHERY. 53 fifty-barrel whale should yield sixty barrels of oil, and, with the sup-porting jaw-bones, will weigh as much as twenty-five oxen of onethousand pounds each. Attached to the throat by a broad base isthe enormous tongue, the size of which can be better conceived bythe fact that twenty-five barrels of oil have been taken from one.Such a tongue v/ould equal in weight ten oxen. * * * The tailof such a whale is about twenty-five feet broad and six feet deep, andis considerably more forked than that of the spermaceti. The pointof juncture with the body is about four feet in diameter, the vertebraabout fifteen inches ; the remainder of the small being packed withrope-like tendons from the size of a finger to that of a mans leg.The great rounded joint at the base of the skull gleams like an ivorysphere, nearly as large round as a carriage wheel. Through thegreatest blood-vessels, more than a foot in diameter, surges, at eachpulsation of a heart as large as a hogshead, a

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