It seemed to be a small pod of whales, I could not tell just how many, for no sooner did one come to the surface and blow, than another, having had his spoutings out, would up flukes and go down. No one could miss seeing that, the great flukes high in air just before the whale sounded, and the cry from the masthead of “There go flukes!” seemed wholly unnecessary. At that time I did not know very much about the habits of whales, or about anything else, for that matter, connected with the life I thought I had elected. Whales—sperm whales, for I always mean sperm whales when I say simply whales—when undisturbed pursue their regular round of activities in an extraordinarily orderly manner. They go below the surface to feed. Nobody knows how deep they go, but they go deep enough to {55} find the squid on which they feed. Sounding whales frequently take half a mile of whale line almost straight down, sometimes more; and they often come up straight at the boat. There is no means of knowing whether they go habitually deeper than that, but the pressure upon their huge bodies at that depth is something enormous, and the changes of pressure in coming up at the rate they sometimes—often—do come up are very rapid. Deep-sea fish, pulled from that depth, are apt to be turned nearly inside out, because of their inability to regulate the pressure in their air-bladders quickly enough. I never knew what mechanism the whale uses, if he has any, to guard against the consequences of such rapid pressure changes, but he certainly does not use the air-bladder method. It makes very little difference what method he uses, or whether he has any other than his great strength, it works very well, and in a way perfectly satisfactory to the whale. Having sounded by the simple method of throwing his flukes in the air, and pointing his body straight down, he stays down for a time which is constant for the individual whale, so far as anybody has been able to observe, and surprisingly uniform for whales in general, taking into account age, size, and sex. The time is undoubtedly determined by the reserves of oxygenated blood he has been able to accumulate in some way or other—entirely obscure to me—to enable him to close his spiracles and hold his breath for an hour or more. For a full-grown bull whale will stay down for an hour or an hour and ten minutes, and when he comes up he breathes perhaps seventy times at intervals of about eleven seconds. When he has taken the usual number of breaths, which is known as “having his spoutings out,” he ups flukes and goes down again. A female will stay down from thirty to forty minutes, and young whales perhaps twenty to thirty, depending upon their age and strength. {56}