told you about. Sometimes
they fight. After they are struck with the harpoon, they lift their
tail, or _fluke_, as they call it, and strike the boat so hard as to
dash it in pieces. Then the poor sailors have to swim to the ship if
they can. If they cannot, and if there is no other boat near them that
they can get into, they must drown.

I once saw a whale that had been struck with a harpoon come up close
to the ship, and give it such a blow with his fluke, that he tore the
copper off at a great rate, and broke a thick plank in half a dozen
pieces.

[Illustration]

[Illustration: The Indian, with his bow and arrows.]

MORE INDIANS.

When I went in the whale-ship, I saw another tribe of Indians, that
were very different from those I told you of before. They knew more
than those Indians. They used bows and arrows; and you would have been
pleased to see how they would hit a mark a great way off, with their
arrows.

One of them, who had a name so long that I will not try to speak it,
used to come every day to our ship, when we were lying near the shore.
He liked pieces of glass, and nails and tin, and things of that kind,
quite as well as the other Indians I told you of. He had seen white
men before, so he was not at all afraid of us. I suppose that almost
all the white men he had seen before used rum and tobacco. He asked
all our sailors for these two things, and kept asking every day. I am
sorry to say that some of the men gave him some rum once in a while,
and one day he drank so much that he got drunk. Poor man! He was not
so much to blame, I think, as the bad sailors that gave him the rum.
What do you think about it?

This man would dive in the water further than anybody I ever saw
before or since. Some of the sailors used to throw pieces of tin into
very deep water, and tell him he might have them if he would dive and
bring them up. He was so fond of such things, that he would always
gladly dive to get them.

I once saw him dive for an old worn-out knife. The water was very deep
where it was thrown. It was so deep that none of us thought he would
get it. He went down, and staid a long, long time. We thought he never
would come up again. The sailor that threw the knife into the water
began to be sorry he had done it, because he thought the poor Indian
was drowned. But, by and by, he came up again, with the knife in his
mouth. He had been hunting after the knife on the bottom of the sea.

These Indi