Page:Twenty Thousand Verne Frith 1876.pdf/10

 The facts relating to this apparition, as recorded in various “logs,” agreed sufficiently respecting the formation of the object—or being—in question, the unheard-of celerity of its movements, its wonderful power of motion, the peculiar life with which it seemed endowed. If it were of the whale species, it exceeded in bulk all that science had hitherto classified. Neither Cuvier, nor Lacépède, nor Dumeril, nor M. de Quatrefages, had admitted the existence of such a monster.

But to strike a medium of the observations made at intervals, rejecting the timid estimates which pronounced this object to be 200 feet long, and putting away the exaggerated opinions which gave it a breadth of one mile and a length of three, we may state, nevertheless, that this extraordinary being exceeded anything hitherto discovered by ichthyologists—supposing it ever existed.

Now if it existed, the fact could not be denied, and with the instinct for the marvellous, indulged in by the average brain of humanity, one can understand the effect produced upon the world by this supernatural apparition. It was quite impossible to treat it as a mere fable.

In fact, upon the 20th July, 1866, the steamer Governor Higginson, of the Calcutta and Burnach Steam Navigation Company, had encountered this moving mass five miles to the east of Australia. Captain Baker was at first under the impression that he had met with an unknown rock, and was preparing to take the bearings of it, when two columns of water, impelled by this extraordinary object, were spurted 150 feet into the air. So, unless this rock were subject to the intermittent expansions of a geyser, the Governor Higginson had in good earnest encountered some aquatic mammifer hitherto un-