Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 277, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 November 1911 — FORTUNE IN STRANDED WHALE [ARTICLE]

FORTUNE IN STRANDED WHALE

Monster Struggles Desperately to Free Itself From Shoals Into Which High Tide Carried It

Atlantic City, N. J. —A 60-foot whale, weighing seven or eight tons, churned the sea into foam off Fourth street Ocean City, the other morning as it struggled desperately to free . itself from the shoals into which he had been carried at high tide by the waves. Spray was dashed ,up 30 and 40 feet as the whale whipped the sea with sweeps es his powerful tail, and for three hours, while the tide was falling, hundreds of persons watched the mammal’s dying struggles. Surfmen from the Ocean City life saving station rushed their craft into the water and cautiously ventured near, but rowed away in fright as the monster threshed about wildly. They hovered close until the whale weakened from his struggles. Then, as the whale, after a last desperate convulsion, surrendered, the government men roped him. He was dead when the men anchored his carcass to the sAids to prevent the sea at high tide from wresting theft prize from them. Low tide at noon enabled the throngs to crowd about the whale and photograph and examine the giant of the ocean. He was pronounced to. be of the'bowhead sperm family, whose value for oil is in the hundreds of dollars.

The life savers, who held that his body is theft property, through discovery and capture, will sell the carcass to a syndicate, which plans to exhibit it in one of the metropolitan cities.

Engineers measured the mammal and declared that his bulk would Indicate the weight as more than seven tons, but he was a smaller stranger from the Arctic seas than the one which was cast up dead on the strand about eighteen years ago in almost the same place.