"No, Sir, 'tis a Right Whale," answered Tom; "I saw his spout; he threw up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at. He's a raal oil-butt, that fellow!"
Cooper's Pilot.
"The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin
Gazette that whales had been introduced on the stage there."
Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe.
"My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?" I answered, "we
have been stove by a whale."
"Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Whale Ship
Essex of Nantucket, which was attacked and
finally destroyed by a large Sperm Whale
in the Pacific Ocean. By Owen Chace
of Nantucket, first mate of said vessel. New
York. 1821.
"A mariner sat in the shrouds one night,
The wind was piping free;
Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale,
And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale,
As it floundered in the sea."
Elizabeth Oakes Smith.
"The quantity of line withdrawn from the different boats
engaged in the capture of this one whale, amounted altogether
to 10,440 yards or nearly six English miles." * * *
"Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air,
which, cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three
or four miles." Scoresby.
"Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks,
the infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his
enormous head, and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes at the boats with his head; they
are propelled before him with vast swiftness, and sometimes
utterly destroyed.
* * * It is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so interesting, and, in a commercial
