It is customary to call whales “fierce,” “savage,” “murderous,” but this is rank libel, for the whale is timid and affectionate.  Every family, however, has its black sheep.  The Orca or Killer is the terror alike of sealing-rookeries, fish-schools, and whale bone whales.  One Killer taken up here had in its stomach fourteen porpoises and fourteen large seals, and it choked to death on the fifteenth.  Banded in Molly Maguire groups, the Killers murder the young seal-pups taking their first lessons in swimming off the Pribilofs.  We have seen them, a pack of hungry sea-wolves, surround a Bowhead whale!  A number of these brigands of the Bering Sea hang on to the lower lip of the big whale till the opened mouth allows a Killer to enter bodily, when the Bowhead’s tongue is eaten out and the whole sea is a shambles.  At the approach of the Killer even sea-lions seek the shore.  And the Alaska Indian who would pose as Bad Bill of the Clambank to the third generation carves a Killer as the crest of his totem.

The American is more aggressive—­shall we say progressive?—­than the Canadian.  The Bowhead whale has within recent years chosen for his summer habitat the pleasant waters off Arctic Canada.  Each of these floating tanks of baleen and oil nets his lucky captor from thirteen thousand dollars upward?, and yet for twenty years Canadians have been content to see their more enterprising cousins from California come into their back-yard and carry off these oily prizes.

[Illustration:  Two Little Ones at Herschel Island]

Is there much money in whales to-day?  Are not oil and whalebone drugs in the market?  Let us see.  Off the Mackenzie mouth is Herschel Island anchorage.  Here, since 1889, the American whaling-fleet, setting out from San Francisco, has made its summer stand, its winter waiting-quarters.  One whale to one boat in a season covers the cost of outfitting and maintenance, and more than one spells substantial profit.  In 1887, one of the Arctic whalers, the steamer Orca, captured twenty-eight whales.  The Jeanette in 1905 got ten whales and a calf, the Karluk got seven whales, the Alexander eight, the Bowhead seven.  The boats wintering at Herschel in that year had among them thirty-three whales and one calf.  At fifteen thousand dollars each (San Francisco values for that season) the thirty-three whales netted very nearly half a million.  Two years later the Narwhal took out fifteen whales, the Jeanette and Bowhead each four.  Although the average bone per head is two thousand pounds, sometimes the catch runs far beyond that figure.  A whale caught by Capt.  Simmons of the ship John M. Winthrop carried thirty-three hundred and fifty pounds of bone in its head,—­$16,750!  One of these at a time would be good fishing.