Harpoon

It impales the target and secures it with barb or toggling claws, allowing the fishermen or hunters to use an attached rope or chain to pull and retrieve the animal.

For example, the Inuit have short, fixed-foreshaft harpoons for hunting at breathing holes, while loose-shafted ones are made for throwing and remaining attached to the game.

[7] In the novel Moby-Dick, Herman Melville explained the reason for the harpoon's effectiveness: In most land animals there are certain valves or flood gates in many of their veins, whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in certain directions.

Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities is, to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so that when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is heightened by the extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance below the surface, his life may be said to pour from him in incessant streams.

Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the well springs of far off and undiscernible hills.He also describes another device that was at times a necessary addition to harpoons: All whale-boats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs [i.e. drogues].

Hence it is that at times like these the drugg comes into requisition.The first use of explosives in the hunting of whales was made by the British South Sea Company in 1737, after some years of declining catches.

The weapon was in turn attached by a line to the boat, and the hope was that the explosion would generate enough gas within the whale to keep it afloat for retrieval.

[10] A notable user of these early explosive harpoons was the American Thomas Welcome Roys in 1865, who set up a shore station in Seydisfjördur, Iceland.

In 1870, the Norwegian shipping magnate Svend Foyn patented and pioneered the modern exploding whaling harpoon and gun.

The spearhead is shaped in a manner which allows it to penetrate the thick layers of whale blubber and stick in the flesh.

[citation needed] The Philae spacecraft carried harpoons for helping the probe anchor itself to the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.