| A
ship on the Northwest coast of America cutting in her last right
whale Drawing by H. W. Elliott from a French lithograph designed
by B. Russell.
One of the first parts of flensing a right whale
was to cut away the baleen plates or "whalebone" to be
hoisted aboard and cleaned and stored. Right whales yielded a
particularly large amount of whalebone and in long pieces, so in
the early days of whaling these were particularly valuable. Later
on in the days of industrial whaling, more economical substitutes
had been found for the whalebone and so what had been a lucrative
part of the early trade was too time consuming to process and not
valuable enough when brought to shore, so it was simply thrown
overboard as useless waste.
Image courtesy NOAA |
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