User:Carbon Caryatid/sandbox/drift whale

Drift whale

Definition
A drift whale is one that has died at sea and floated in to shore, as opposed to a beached or stranded whale, which reaches land alive, and may die there or regain safety in the ocean. Most whales that die, from natural causes or predators, do not wind up on land; most die far offshore and sink deep to become novel ecological zones known as whale fall. Some species that wash ashore are scientifically dolphins, i.e. members of the Delphinidae family, but for ease of use, this article will treat them all as "drift whales". For example, one species notorious for mass strandings is the pilot whale, also known as "blackfish", which is taxonomically a dolphin.

In historical sources, it is not always clear whether a given cetacean washed up alive or dead, but the term "drift whale" focuses on the benefits of its carcass to the people who claimed it. Nowadays, when a dead whale washes up on a beach, often the authorities are required to dispose of it as a potential hazard to human health, so the resource implications go the other way: a drift whale is no longer a benefit to a community, but an expensive disadvantage.

Species
Many cetacean species have been documented as drift whales, but some are more common than others. In New England, for example, the carcasses of fin, humpback, sperm, right, and pilot whales, as well as dolphins, are most likely to drift ashore. Some species have a naturally high buoyancy, and float when they are dead, aided by the gases of putrefaction.

Whales that live in the pelagic ocean, far from the continental shelf, are less likely to wash up ashore than coastal species. Once these deep-sea animals do find themselves in shallower waters, however, they may run into difficulties, as the gradual shelving of the shoreline is thought to play a role in confusing their sense of echolocation. Sperm whale strandings are known to have occurred in the North Sea for centuries, and the incidents may be increasing with louder ship noise.

Reasons
Most whale species have no predators other than the orca (killer whale) and certain large sharks (such as the dusky ), which in both cases tend to attack in groups and focus on one young whale. Some drift whale carcasses show injuries consistent with attacks from these species, or, in modern times, with ship strikes (e.g. trauma from a propeller). Another obvious and visible cause of traumatic death is entanglement with fishing gear, which kills tens of thousands of cetaceans each year, according to the International Whaling Commission.

Other carcasses show no visible injury, and theories about why the animals died include the possibilities discussed for live strandings (XYZ) (especially Marine mammals and sonar) as well as illness. Sometimes a necroscopy is performed.

Locations
Certain beaches are well known as likely spots for drift whales, and indeed other gifts from the sea such as drift seeds and driftwood.

Coastal features have been named after the phenomenon, such as Drift Whale Bay within Brooks Peninsula Provincial Park on the Pacific Coast of Vancouver Island. Saint-Clément-des-Baleines on the Atlantic coast of France is named after its stranding beach.

--- Modern beachcombing depends on a knowledge of how storms, geography, ocean currents, and seasonal events determine the arrival and exposure of rare finds.
 * copied from Beachcombing

Scavenging vs hunting
People have been using drift whales for millennia, long before we began active whaling. However, in relying on the archaeological record, the distinction between first scavenging and then hunting is not clear-cut.

Whales as windfall
The whales' massive carcasses provided coastal communities with considerable amounts of meat and fat, and without the dangers of going out onto the open ocean to harpoon a living leviathan. (An additional resource, in the treeless Arctic, was the long bones, useful for construction.) The bounty and good fortune inherent in this find are recognised in etymology: "The meaning of the word “drift-whale” in Icelandic, “hvalreki,” has the same meaning as “wind-fall” – an unexpected good incurred at no cost,' according to Sigrún Davíðsdóttir, London correspondent of the Icelandic national broadcaster RÚV. Indeed, Thomas Talbot Waterman and Alfred Louis Kroeber, anthropologists who worked with Yurok informants in California, classified drift whales as a gathered resource, rather than a hunted one, as those who benefited ran no risk.

Precontact aboriginal
Coastal people around the world came up with a technique called dolphin drive hunting, which exploits the animals' tendency to beach themselves. This sort of hunt, which depends on substantial community co-operation, still continues in a few places, as far apart as the North Atlantic (Whaling in the Faroe Islands), the South Pacific (Malaita dolphin drive hunt), and Japan (Taiji dolphin drive hunt).

It is harder to find evidence, archaeological or ethnographic, of North American indigenous people hunting large whales before cultural contact with Europeans, according to scholars of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

One leads to the other
The skills learned from processing drift whales, such as flensing (stripping the blubber), may have led to seeking out live ones. For example, the Makah of Washington State have been hunting grey whales for at least 1500 years, but were harvesting stranded whales for many centuries before that. On the other side of North America, drift whale scavenging on the Outer Banks of North Carolina led to organised hunts, documented at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum.

When the early settlers arrived in New England, they observed from the deck of the Mayflower a huge number of whales, far more than they were accustomed to see in European waters, according to American historian W. Jeffrey Bolster From 1644, the colony of Southampton, on Long Island, New York, established an organised whale fishery, significant in the history of whaling as the first in New England. The colonists observed the Native Americans' hunting techniques as they herded pilot whales onto the shelving beaches for slaughter, practised flensing the carcasses and rendering the blubber, improved on their weapons and boats, and then progressed to hunting on the ocean. Other settlements followed suit. This early drift whaling at Southampton led gradually to the nearby Sag Harbor whaling fleet becoming the biggest in New York State, according to a curator at the local whaling museum.

Both scavenging and hunting
Some communities both hunted and scavenged. William Barr, the Arctic historian, gives two examples of the late eighteenth century: the Moravian missions on Labrador, and possibly the Inuit of Hudson Strait, who had a trading relationship with the supply ships of the Hudson's Bay Company. However, Barr assumes that the drift whales were ones that the Inuit hunters (or possibly the European whaling ships) had harpooned and wounded, and the carcasses had come ashore some time later.

Importance as a food resource
Drift whales formed an important food resource for some coastal communities, both in quantity and quality.

American historian and master mariner W. Jeffrey Bolster argues that drift whales used to be so common along the Atlantic Coast that the indigenous peoples had no need to hunt them: "Natives' opportunistic reliance on drift whales sufficed for their needs". Nicolas Denys, an early settler in Acadia (now Nova Scotia), wrote that the Mi'kmaq people "relished the blubber" from drift whales, which were a frequent occurrence.

On the Pacific Coast, R. Lee Lyman proposed that drift whales might have formed a considerable summer food resource for pre-contact people living in what is now Oregon. For the Yurok peopl further south, "Discovery of a dead whale was a momentous event, for it meant a great addition to the stores."


 * To the Chiefs of old this land was very great in their sight because they ate the drift whale that drifted on the shores of their land, also drift sea lion and everything that drifted onto their land. --The Tsunami At ؛Anaqtl’a or "Pachena Bay"
 * From: E.Y. Arima, Louis Clamhouse, Joshua Edgar, Charles Jones, and John Thomas, Barkley Sound Southeast, 1989, Between Ports Alberni and Renfrew: Notes on West Coast Peoples, Canadian Museum of Civilization, pp. 207, 230, 231, 264, & 265


 * https://pnsn.org/outreach/native-american-stories/other-stories/the-tsunami-at-anaqtl-a-or-pachena-bay

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/mawer-trade.html?scp=1&sq=rough%2520cutt&st=cse

An indispensable, up-to-date overview of the archaeology of the Native peoples and earliest settlers of eastern Massachusetts. The archaeology and histories of the Native peoples and earliest settlers of eastern Massachusetts come vividly to life in these pages. Leading archaeologists and anthropologists share the latest findings and interpretations on a wide range of topics, including the enduring strands of significance of drift whales

Risks
Wrapped in a thick thermal blanket of blubber, the carcass retains its mammalian heat, and the process of decomposition takes place relatively quickly; once ashore, there is a risk of the swollen whale exploding.

Consuming the carcasses of animals that have been dead for a long time carries risks of food poisoning or worse. In 2002, fourteen residents of a Bering Sea fishing village ate muktuk (skin and blubber) from a beluga whale which they "estimated had been dead for at least several weeks", resulting in eight of them developing botulism, with two of the affected requiring mechanical ventilation. The Centers for Disease Control recommended boiling Alaska Native dishes to rid them of the botulism toxin.

Rights
Peoples that value whale meat and blubber, but who were without direct access to the stranding beaches, traded the rights to drift whales, for example bartering fishing rights to inland rivers. Specific individuals may have hereditary rights to drift whales.

Rights in Iceland
Rights of harpooner, land owner, tenant - e.g. one quarter of whatever he has flensed -- Laws of Early Iceland: Gragas, the Codex Regius of Gragas, with Material from Other Manuscripts 9780887551154


 * While the whales that drifted ashore on Skalla-Grímr’s newly-claimed land were positive forces in the drive to claim land, the post-settlement drift whale was also a fraught literary topos with the power to draw out existing conflicts and send characters into direct opposition.


 * Ambiguity in the notion of land-ownership raises further questions: the drifted whale helped to reinforce boundaries, the island-whale to defy them. Whales had something beyond their meat and blubber to offer in these stories, namely, the redefinition of a new land.

https://skemman.is/bitstream/1946/27089/3/Thesis.pdf

Royal fish in England
A charter granted to Hilary, Bishop of Chichester, in 1148 gave him the right to “any whale found on the land of the church of Chichester, except the tounge, which is the Kings.” The English king had asserted the right to the entire whale by 1315 when Edward II reserved “to himself the right of all whales cast by chance upon the shore.” Whales came to be known as “Royal fish”, the disposal of which was an exclusive right of the monarch, or his local representative. Indeed, to this day, the Crown Estate asserts that "theoretically The Queen can claim ownership" of beached whales and other "Royal fish". -- copied from Whaling in the United Kingdom


 * The Law of the Whale Hunt: Dispute Resolution, Property Law, and American whalers, 1780-1880. Robert Deal. New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2016.  -- Info re English Crown rights. --9781107114630

Rights in early New England
Well documented in New England.


 * "Drift whales at Nantucket" - a very detailed account
 * From before 1688 until at least 1728, Nantucket Indians engaged in a structured whaling industry, centered around drift or stranded whales.[...] [they] retained these rights as they sold land to the English. [...] Indian retention of all drift whale rights was unique to Nantucket. Now this is all quite interesting because, for the English, whales are royal fish and belong to the king or his grantee. [...] the Nantucket sachems retained sovereignty over drift whales, with a possessiveness that was in marked contrast to their lack of possessiveness of land. The importance of drift whales in the Nantucket economy resulted in documents that record the Indian political structure governing ownership of drift whale rights. Each of the four major sachems chose ten men for a committee to assign drift whale rights on Indian lands.
 * 1438432542


 * Once a whale washed ashore, of course, it was bound to end up as someone’s property, and whales entered early American law through the question of who owned them when they did. On Long Island, a town’s householders divvied up the oil among themselves, after paying a few shillings to the finder and something to the butcher, and sometimes surrendering the fins and flukes to local Indians for ceremonial use. In Massachusetts, Plymouth Colony taxed towns by taking a barrel of oil from every drift whale.
 * https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/07/23/there-she-blew
 * Review by Caleb Crain of “Leviathan” (Norton; $27.95), Eric Jay Dolin 2007


 * Blackfish provided welcome meat and oil. Whales were everywhere, unlike in coastal Europe. There were apparently tens of thousands of great whales in the Gulf of Maine for much of the year at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Even landsmen such as Bradford [ William Bradford (Plymouth Colony governor) ] noticed the difference. [...] -- Mortal Sea p 70

Mortal Sea, page 70 -- W. Jeffrey Bolster is a Professor of history at the University of New Hampshire in the United States, and the author of The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail, which won the 2013 Bancroft Prize in history of the Americas, and the 2013 Albert J. Beveridge Award.

W. Jeffrey Bolster


 * Following permanent English settlement, Natives' right to appropriate drift whales was lost rather quickly on Martha's Vineyard and Long Island. On Nantucket, however, that right was codified into law in 1673. “The Court do order that . . . all the whal fish or Other drift fish belong to the Indian sachems.” Purchasing shore frontage from Nantucket sachems in a series of transactions between 1684 and 1701, English buyers always agreed to the caveat, “except drift whales.” And on Nantucket and eastern Long Island, at least, because “Indian ownership of drift whales pre-empted the crown's rights … whale oil from Indian drift whales may have been exported tax-free.” The exact steps by which settlers proceeded from scavenging beached whales to pursuing whales from the beach are lost to time, but whales' significance is not. In 1635 Governor John Winthrop noted that “Some of our people went to Cape Cod, and made some oil of a whale which was cast on shore.” -- Mortal Sea p 70

Pacific coast rights
Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast


 * Nuu-chah-nulth chiefs jealously guarded their drift rights to anything that washed up on the beaches of their territories (Arima and Hoover 2011, 64; Drucker 1951, 39). Other outer coast peoples, such as the Salish groups on the Washington coast, also had demarcated territories with exclusive ownership of beached whales (Hajda 1990, 507).

A drift whale was considered a chief's property, and once it was brought to shore, it would become the possession of the haw'ilth on whose beach it had landed.
 * Spirits of our whaling ancestors : revitalizing Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth traditions
 * 9780295990460

Precise ways of dividing the carcass of a drift whale, and how that differs from a hunted whale.-- Hishok, Tseshaht Whaling, One With the Whale Spirit Tseshaht First Nation 1312916079

Mythology and ritual
Drift whales feature in myths and fables, such as this cautionary tale told by William of Barkley Sound on Vancouver Island, collected by Edward Sapir and re-told by Kathryn Anne Bridge in a compendium about the Huu-ay-aht First Nations:

"Chief Si'xpa'tskwin of Cape Beale was always trying to better himself as a whaler. ...Looking south one day, he saw a drift whale, way, way out. ...Then they saw it, floating on the sea. It was indeed a dead whale. They manoevered the canoe close to the carcass. They were extremely tired and stopped paddling. ...How would they ever have the strength to drag the carcass to shore?"

The chiefs of certain West Coast peoples built private sacred places, called whalers' washing houses, where they could ritually purify themselves. The spiritual preparation that they undertook was not only for skill in the chase of living whales, but also to attract drift whales to their beach. The good fortune of the chief was understood to be tied to the spirit world, and the remains of human ancestors - especially the skulls - were used to ask for "whaling magic". The best known of these is the Yuquot Whalers Shrine, associated with the great Mowachaht chief Maquinna.

The Nuu-chah-nulth and Makah peoples used similar shrines to pull drift whales to them.


 * These whaling shrines, also called whalers' washing houses, held great spiritual significance in both Nuu-chah-nulth and Makah societies. They were utilized exclusively by the whaling chiefs for their purification rituals. Whaling haw'iih inherited secret sites where these shrines were erected. They would go there to perform their sacred rituals and prayers to the spirits, asking them for what Mowachaht haw'ilth Jerry Jack called cheesum, or “whaling magic,” which was needed to capture a whale. Even the techniques utilized by the whalers were connected to the spirit world. It was understood that whalers' ancestors were instructed by spirits on the proper rituals to be performed in these secret locations. ... The shrines were also used by whaling chiefs to conduct rituals to entice dead whales onto their beaches. A drift whale was considered a chief's property, and once it was brought to shore, it would become the possession of the haw'ilth on whose beach it had landed. In the Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth belief system there was an understanding that the power an individual received from the spirit world could be transferred to another person after that individual died. The drift whale ritual incorporated this philosophy and involved the use of human corpses. The dead, especially the cadavers of successful whaling chiefs, were believed to have “mysterious power over whales.” ... The great Mowachaht chief Maquinna had an elaborate whaling shrine hidden on an island close to the village of Yuquot. The shrine contained over eighty anthropomorphic carvings and numerous human skulls.
 * Spirits of our whaling ancestors : revitalizing Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth traditions
 * 9780295990460

Images
thumb|A beachcomber is touching a dead whale washed ashore at Ocean beach edit 1

thumb|140822-A-OI229-008 (14845207828) thumb|140822-A-OI229-006 (15031465712) PORTSMOUTH, Va. – Norfolk District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers employees use an excavator to pull a dead 45-foot sei whale onshore for a necropsy here Aug. 22, 2014. The whale spent a week swimming in the Elizabeth River’s Southern Branch and eventual perished. Through its mandate of keeping the federal navigation channels clear of damaging debris, the Norfolk District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, assisted in the necropsy by using heavy equipment and burying the remains at its Craney Island facility. (U.S. Army photo/Patrick Bloodgood)

thumb|An illustration of "Whales" from the German encyclopedia [[Meyers Konversations-Lexikon.]]

thumb|Illustration from the Russian encyclopedia [[Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary.]]

---

Image of Maquinna or Yuquot shrine

thumb|Le Labrador - Baleine dévorée par des loups

thumb|Three beached sperm whales, 1577 - explanation on refdesk Reference_desk/Language

thumb|Im Februar 1598 an der holländischen Küste gestrandeter Walfisch

Dutch engraver Jan Saenredam thumb|Jan Saenredam03 Engraving of a beached Sperm Whale at Beverwijk on 19 December 1601. Curious crowds stream to view it. The artist Jan Saenredam is in the left foreground sketching the whale. Various people are measuring it. The Latin text notes that it was 60 ft long and 14 ft high, a circumference of 36 ft, a tail of 14 ft and a lower jaw of 12 ft. The main figure in the group of onlookers, and holding a handkerchief to his nose, is Ernst Casimir, count of Nassau and hero of the Spanish War.

thumb|Eubalaena glacialis dead - ship strike? "boat propellor"

thumb|16th century Icelanders cutting a whale AM345fol Icelanders flensing thumb|Dividing a whale, from a manuscript from the 16th century Same imgae? "Dividing"

Neah Bay, Washington Makah thumb|Indian Whalers Stripping Their Prey at Neah Bay - 1910

thumb|A beachcomber is looking at the marks of great white sharks bites