My measurements may not have been absolutely accurate, but still the whale was, I imagine, of record size.

As she lay there on the beach her head towered above me to a height of nearly fifteen feet.
Never can I forget the scene that followed, when the blacks from the surrounding country responded to the smoke-signals announcing the capture of the "great fish." From hundreds of miles south came the natives, literally in their thousands--every man provided with his stone tomahawk and a whole armoury of shell knives.

They simply swarmed over the carcasses like vermin, and I saw many of them staggering away under solid lumps of flesh weighing between thirty and forty pounds.

The children also took part in the general feasting, and they too swarmed about the whales like a plague of ants.
A particularly enterprising party of blacks cut an enormous hole in the head of the big whale, and in the bath of oil that was inside they simply wallowed for hours at a time, only to emerge in a condition that filled me with disgust.

There was no question of priority or disputing as to whom the tit-bits of the whale should go.