Mother and Baby Sperm Whale off the Coast of Mauritius, c. 2000
Sperm Whale Head Anatomy: Skeleton, Spermaceti, and Junk, c. 2010
Global Sperm Whale Catching, 1800s-1980s
Speak, thou vast and venerable head… and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust; and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, thou there was thy most familiar home.
Herman Melville, "Captain Ahab to the Head of a Decapitated Sperm Whale" from Moby Dick, 1851