Bomb lance
A bomb lance is a projectile weapon used in whaling to injure and kill the object of the hunt. As the name implies, it does its work by explosively detonating once it has embedded itself into a whale.[1]
In 1874, a bomb lance was 21.5 inches long and pointed with three elastic feathers. It was fired from a three-foot long bomb gun made of iron, with a 23-inch barrel and a 1 1/8 inch bore. It weighed twenty-four pounds.[2] Though it was first used as early as 1849,[3] it wasn't widely utilized by open-boat whalemen until the late 1850s.[4] It had an accurate range of about sixty feet. It was used to kill whales from a distance instead of using a hand-thrown lance.[5] Men were occasionally injured when the guns burst.[6] Between 1850 and 1870, several different types of shoulder guns were patented for firing bomb lances, including those made by Captain Ebenezer Pierce, Patrick Cunningham, Selmar Eggers, and Christopher Brand.[7][8] Shoulder guns were used for firing bomb lances throughout whaling into the 20th century.[9]
In 2007, Inupiat whalers using a modern bomb lance killed a 50-ton bowhead, kicking off a flurry of research into species longevity when it was revealed that the whale's body also contained fragments of an older bomb lance manufactured back in the 19th century, leading to the discovery that the whale was over 130 years old.[1][10]
References
- ^ a b "A Whale of a Sliver". Retrieved 2021-06-10.
- ^ Scammon, Charles (1874, 1968). The Marine Mammals of the Northwestern Coast of North America: Together with an account of the American Whale-Fishery. Dover, New York, p. 26.
- ^ Prudent, of Stonington, April 20, 1849, 37° 04' N, 132° 15' E (19th), Mystic Seaport Museum (MSM).
- ^ Lindholm, O. V., Haes, T. A., & Tyrtoff, D. N. (2008). Beyond the frontiers of imperial Russia: From the memoirs of Otto W. Lindholm. Javea, Spain: A. de Haes OWL Publishing.
- ^ Bockstoce, John R. (1986). Whales, Ice, and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic. University of Washington Press, London and Seattle, p. 62.
- ^ Charles W. Morgan, June 26, 1861, of New Bedford, 57° 02' N, 153° 09' E, MSM.
- ^ Webb, Robert Llyod (1988). On the Northwest: Commercial Whaling in the Pacific Northwest, 1790-1967. University of Vancouver Press, Vancouver, p. 122.
- ^ "Shoulder Guns". whalecraft.net. Archived from the original on 2017-07-05. Retrieved 2022-08-24.
- ^ "Shoulder Guns". whalecraft.net. Archived from the original on 2017-07-05. Retrieved 2018-02-27.
- ^ Karen Latchana Kenney (2018). Extreme Longevity: Discovering Earth's Oldest Organisms. Lerner Publishing Group. p. 11-12. ISBN 9781541538191.