Bomb lance

A bomb lance is a projectile weapon used in whaling to injure and kill the object of the hunt.

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.

[7] 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.

[9] In 2007, Inupiat whalers conducting a traditional subsistence hunt killed a 50-ton bowhead with a modern bomb lance, 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] “No other finding has been this precise,” said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.