Page:Enterprise and Adventure.djvu/60

42 sight of one which displayed the signal of being fast. Soon after, another boat approached the first, and struck a second harpoon; and by mid-day, two more harpoons were made fast.

But such was the astonishing vigour of this whale, that although it constantly dragged through the water from four to six boats, together with sixteen hundred fathoms of line, yet it pursued its flight nearly as fast as a boat could row, and whenever one passed beyond its tail it would dive. All endeavours to lance it were therefore vain, and the crews of the loose boats moored to those that were fast, the whale all the time steadily towing them on.

At eight o'clock in the evening a line was taken to the ship, with a view of retarding its flight, and topsails were lowered, but the harpoon drew. In three hours another line was taken on board, which immediately snapped. At four in the afternoon of the next day, thirty-six hours after the whale was first struck, two of the fast lines were taken on board the ship.

The most dreadful display of the whale's strength and prowess yet authentically recorded, was that made upon the American whale-ship "Essex," Captain Pollard, which sailed from Nantucket for the Pacific Ocean, in August, 1819. Late in the fall of the same year, when in lat. 40° of the South Pacific, a number of sperm whales was discovered, and three boats were manned and sent in pursuit. The mate's boat was struck by one of them, and he was obliged to return to the ship in order to repair the damage.

While he was engaged in that work, a sperm whale, judged to be eighty-five feet long, appeared about twenty