In May 2007, hunters at Barrow, Alaska, landed a bowhead whale and found something lodged in its neck: a fragment of a bomb lance, a small exploding shell fired from a shoulder gun, of a type patented in 1879 and probably made in New Bedford. The best guess is that it was fired around 1890. So the whale had been shot by commercial whalers in Victorian times, survived it, healed over the wound, and then swum for another century or so with the evidence under its blubber. That fragment is one of the reasons anyone believes bowheads can live well past a hundred. Nobody wrote the date down. The whale kept the receipt.