When the carnage has ended and the receding tide has left the _grind_ high and dry upon the beach, the sheriff and his assistants count and measure the animals preparatory to allotment. Every porpoise has its special number cut into the thick blubber which covers its cylindrical head. The largest whale is given to the native who first sighted the school. One-tenth of the rest is put aside for the sheriff’s fee, taxes, and expenses; of the remainder a large proportion is allotted to the villagers living on the borders of the fjord where the kill takes place, every woman and child having a share. The total value of a catch of five or six hundred may be over $12,000. The morning following the hunt the cutting in begins, each crew or group of villages taking, without bickering or protestation, the whales apportioned to them by the sheriff. After the blubber has been removed, the meat is carefully cut away from the skeleton, piled in neat heaps, and carried away by the women in wooden creels to their homes. All that remains to mark the scene of carnage is the white skeletons bleaching in the sun. But blackfish are not of use to the Faroe Islanders alone, for wherever one of the old-time whaling vessels cruises for sperm whales, the green crews and gear are tried out if a school is found. And throughout the voyage when whales are scarce, few of the vessels are above “lowering” for a herd of these huge porpoises. The common blackfish of the North Atlantic is without a trace of color above, but has a narrow line of white on the breast and belly, which widens into a fountain-jet shape on the throat. The species found on the American Atlantic coast south of New York (_G. brachypterus_) is black everywhere upon its body, like the blackfish of the Pacific (_G. scammoni_). Twenty-four feet seems to be about the maximum size of this porpoise, which in the entire family is exceeded in length only by the killer whale. CHAPTER XXVI THE PASSING OF THE WHALE The world hunt for the whale began a thousand years ago in the Bay of Biscay and it bids fair to end ere the close of the twentieth century. After the extermination of the North Atlantic right whale on the coast of Spain, the hunters pushed northward to Finland and Iceland, and it is even possible that whalers visited Newfoundland long before Columbus saw American shores. The relentless warfare to which the right whale was subjected for hundreds of years culminated in the sixteenth century, and only stopped short of actual extermination through the discovery, in the far north, of its larger and more valuable relative, the bowhead. Then the right whale dropped from sight, supposedly being extinct, and although it appeared again a hundred years later, it has never recovered from the effects of its early persecution.