Page:The Wireless Operator with the U.S. Coast Guard.djvu/210

 him to watch them. And when he found that a shoal of them was swimming immediately m front of the ship’s prow, he leaned over the forward rail with the sailors, and watched them. In particular he was interested in two of the great, lumbering bodies that swam side by side immediately before the cutwater. Their tails almost touched the prow. They looked as though they were towing the ship, as apparently, without effort, they kept pace with it. But when a sailor hit one of them with a clinker, frightening them, the great fish showed that they were anything but lumbering. They darted away from the Iroquois as though that ship were tied to a post, instead of traveling fourteen or fifteen miles an hour. Henry wondered how fast porpoises could swim. He thought that they must be going at least twice as fast as the cutter. He remembered that he had read of the enormous speed of those curious denizens of the deep, the barracuda and the sailfish, which travel sixty or even seventy miles an hour.

But if the porpoises interested Henry, the next fishes he saw held him almost speechless, for off the Nantucket shoals the Iroquois came upon several whales. With the glasses Henry could make them out plainly. Enormous bulks they were, and at times they spouted columns of water aloft, which was quickly blown into misty spray