Let’s walk across the deck and take a long, close look at the right whale’s head.
A sperm whale’s head, with its broad rounded front, brings to mind an old‑Roman war chariot.
The right whale’s head, though, looks far less graceful. From a distance it resembles a giant, wide‑toed work shoe.
Two hundred years ago, a Dutch sailor compared its shape to the wooden last a shoemaker uses to form shoes.
That “shoe” is so big, you could fit an old fairy‑tale woman and her whole swarm of children comfortably inside it.
Step closer, and the head looks different depending on where you stand.
If you climb up on top and stare down at its two F‑shaped blowholes, the whole skull could pass for an enormous cello. Those openings look like holes cut into the instrument’s soundboard.
Shift your gaze to the strange, ridged, barnacle‑crusted growth on the very top. Green and encrusted with sea life, Greenland whalers call this the whale’s “crown”; southern fishermen name it its “bonnet.”
Stare only at that crusty growth, and the head starts to look like a massive oak trunk with a bird’s nest wedged in its branches.
Small live crabs often nest inside that bonnet, and they make that comparison feel even more natural.
Or you might go with the whalers’ name “crown,” and picture this beast as some ocean king wearing a rough green crown built from barnacles and sea growth.
If he really is sea royalty, he wears his crown with a terrible scowl.
Just look at that huge hanging lower lip.
It juts out in one giant pout. Measured by ship carpenters, that pouting lip runs about twenty feet long and five feet deep. It holds more than five hundred gallons of valuable whale oil.
This poor creature has what looks like a split‑lip defect. The crack stretches roughly one foot wide.
The story goes its mother may have been swimming near Peru during an earthquake when the whale was developing, and the shaking somehow caused this split.
We slide over that slippery lip, like crossing a threshold, right into the whale’s mouth.
Standing here, I could almost believe I was inside an old Native‑American wigwam.
Good heavens. Could this have been the passage Jonah travelled through?
The ceiling rises twelve feet high, sloping sharply up to a central ridge like the supporting beam of a tent.
Along the curved, ribbed inner walls hang hundreds of curved, sword‑shaped baleen plates. There are around three hundred on each side.
These plates hang down from the bone of the whale’s crown, acting just like slatted Venetian blinds.
Fine hairy fibres fringe every edge of the baleen. When the whale swims through thick swarms of tiny sea‑creatures with its mouth open, water flows out through those hairs, trapping all the small food inside its mouth.
Whalers have noticed faint marks, curves, hollows and ridges on these central baleen plates. Some try to guess the whale’s age from those markings, much like reading growth rings on an oak tree.
Nobody can prove this method works for certain, but the idea makes enough sense. If you trust that way of counting, right whales live to an incredibly old age.
Long ago, sailors came up with all sorts of odd names for these baleen plates.
One old travel book called them strange “whiskers” growing inside the whale’s mouth.
Another writer labelled them “hog bristles.”
A third old explorer described them as two hundred and fifty little fins arching over the whale’s tongue.
It is worth noting the right whale does have a few sparse white hairs near the outer end of its lower jaw, a real sort of moustache. Those tufts can give its solemn face something of a rough, outlaw look.
All those “bristles”, “fins”, “whiskers”, or “blinds”—the baleen—once got turned into stiff stays for women’s clothing and other rigid accessories.
That demand has mostly died off long ago.
Baleen was most popular back in Queen Anne’s era, when wide hoop skirts were everywhere.
Ladies of that time strutted around supported by material pulled from inside whale mouths.
Even today we still rely on that same baleen heritage. When rain starts falling, we open umbrellas. Those umbrella frames trace back to whale‑bone technology.
Set aside thoughts of blinds and whiskers for a moment. Stand inside the right whale’s mouth and look around once more.
Row after row of baleen plates stand neatly arranged all around you. It feels like you are standing inside the massive Haarlem church organ, staring at thousands of organ pipes.
For soft carpet underfoot you have the whale’s tongue. It is thick, soft and fat, stuck flat to the bottom of the mouth. It tears very easily when crews try to lift it up onto the ship’s deck.
Looking at this tongue, I would guess it will render around six barrels of whale oil.
By now you can plainly see just how completely different these two whale heads really are.
To recap:
The right whale’s head holds none of the huge oily sperm‑whale spermaceti wells. It has no hard ivory teeth. It does not have that long, slender lower jaw you see on sperm whales.
Meanwhile the sperm whale has no baleen blinds, no massive hanging lower lip, and hardly any tongue worth mentioning.
One more clear difference: the right whale has two separate blowholes out on top of its head. The sperm whale only has one.
Take one final good look at these ancient giant heads sitting side‑by‑side.
Soon one will sink down into the ocean, forgotten. The other will follow not long after.
Notice the expression frozen on the sperm whale’s head. It looks exactly as it did when it died. Only some of the deep wrinkles across its broad forehead have faded.
Its wide brow carries a quiet, prairie‑like calm. It seems to have faced death with thoughtful indifference.
Now turn to the right whale’s head. Its huge lower lip happens to press tight against the ship’s hull, clamped closed around its jaw.
This whole head feels like it belongs to a creature that met death with tough, practical resolve.
I imagine this right whale as a stoic. The sperm whale feels more like a Platonist, the sort that might have taken up Spinoza’s philosophy in its later life.