sing vessel two days later.
The whale itself met retribution five months later, when it was taken by
another American ship. Two of the "Ann Alexander's" harpoons were in him,
his head bore deep scars, and in it were imbedded pieces of the ill-fated
ship's timbers.

Instances of the combativeness of the sperm-whale are not confined to the
records of the whale fishery. Even as I write I find in a current San
Francisco newspaper the story of the pilot-boat "Bonita," sunk near the
Farallon Islands by a whale that attacked her out of sheer wantonness and
lust for fight. The "Bonita" was lying hove-to, lazily riding the swells,
when in the dark--it was 10 o'clock at night--there came a prodigious
shock, that threw all standing to the deck and made the pots and pans of
the cook's galley jingle like a chime out of tune. From the deck the
prodigious black bulk of a whale, about eighty feet long, could be made
out, lying lazily half out of water near the vessel. The timbers of the
"Bonita" must have been crushed by his impact, for she began to fill, and
soon sank.

In this case the disaster was probably not due to any rage or malicious
intent on the part of the whale. Indeed, in the days when the ocean was
more densely populated with these huge animals, collision with a whale was
a well-recognized maritime peril. How many of the stout vessels against
whose names on the shipping list stands the fatal word "missing," came to
their ends in this way can never be known; but maritime annals are full of
the reports of captains who ran "bows on" into a mysterious reef where the
chart showed no obstruction, but which proved to be a whale, reddening the
sea with his blood, and sending the ship--not less sorely wounded--into
some neighboring port to refit.

The tools with which the business of hunting the whale is pursued are
simple, even rude. Steam, it is true, has succeeded to sails, and
explosives have displaced the sinewy arm of the harpooner for launching
the deadly shafts; but in the main the pursuit of the monsters is
conducted now as it was sixty years ago, when to command a whaler was the
dearest ambition of a New England coastboy. The vessels were usually brigs
or barks, occasionally schooners, ranging from 100 to 500 tons. They had a
characteristic architecture, due in part to the subordination of speed to
carrying capacity, and further to the specially heavy timbering about the
bows to withstand the crushing of the Arctic ice