This story hits me at a number of levels. I had no idea whales lived so long.   General unhappiness at the professed need to kill these complex and intelligent animals.   Hounded for a century – we finally got ‘im.

Link: 19th-century weapon found in whale – Yahoo! News.

A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a
weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar
hunt — more than a century ago.

Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped
projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale’s age,
estimated between 115 and 130 years old.

"No other finding has been this precise," said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Calculating a whale’s age can be difficult, and is usually gauged by
amino acids in the eye lenses. It’s rare to find one that has lived
more than a century, but experts say the oldest were close to 200 years
old.

The bomb lance fragment, lodged a bone between the whale’s neck and
shoulder blade, was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the
southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time,
Bockstoce said.

It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around
1890. The small metal cylinder was filled with explosives fitted with a
time-delay fuse so it would explode seconds after it was shot into the
whale. The bomb lance was meant to kill the whale immediately and
prevent it from escaping.

The device exploded and probably injured the whale, Bockstoce said.

"It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a
non-lethal place," he said. "He couldn’t have been that bothered if he
lived for another 100 years."