Nine days later, William Armstrong, chairman of Wexford harbour board, bought the carcass at auction from the royal agent for £111. Ned Wickham was paid £50 for salvage of the whale. Some months later Armstrong sold the whale’s skeleton including its baleen to the Natural History Museum, London, for £256.

To prepare the skeleton for shipping, Armstrong had the whale towed to Raven beach, Curracloe, and hired a team of workers to butcher and clean it. This process took several weeks. The stench of the animal was appalling. Large lumps of meat washed in at Rosslare, Curracloe, and other sites along the coast. Meanwhile on Rosslare Fort, the whale’s blubber was being boiled to produce whale oil –  Armstrong harvested 14 barrels of whale oil, each holding over 200 litres of oil.

Today the skeleton of the blue whale (named ‘Hope’ by The Natural History Museum) hangs in the Hintze hall of the The Natural History Museum, London.

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Richard C. Sabin, Principal Curator, Mammals, at The Natural History Museum, London writes: 

“Hope was a blue whale female (identified at the time of her death in March 1891 but confirmed in 2018 by DNA analysis of her bones and baleen). She was a young female, approximately 15-20 years old (blue whales can live up to around 80 years). By taking samples from her baleen, we were able to look at traces of carbon which were laid down in these tissues as she travelled from (approximately) Iceland to the Azores each year, going south to mate in the winter and returning north to feed in the summer. Another set of samples from her baleen allowed us to look at hormones present in her tissues, specifically, the presence of pregnancy hormones which confirmed that she had given birth in the year before she died. As she returned north, passing SE Ireland in March 1891, she may have been weakened from producing milk for her calf and may not have been strong enough to free herself when she became stuck on a sandbank in Wexford Harbour.”

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