and showing a dish as well cleared as if it had
previously been freighted with veal cutlets, and was now on its return
from the midshipmen's berth.

"Ho! ho!" sung out Jack, running back to the forecastle; "if the
skipper eats porpoise, I don't see why we should be nice; so here
goes!" Then pulling forth the great clasp-knife which always hangs by
a cord round the neck of a seaman, he plunged it into the sides of the
fish, and, after separating the outside rind of blubber, detached
half-a-dozen pounds of the red meat, which, in texture and taste, and
in the heat of its blood, resembles beef, though very coarse. His
example was so speedily followed by the rest of the ship's company,
that when I walked forward, after dinner, in company with the doctor,
to take the post-mortem view of the porpoise more critically than
before, we found the whole had been broiled and eaten within
half-an-hour after I had unconsciously given, by my example, an
official sanction to the feast.

On the 24th of May, the day before crossing the equator, I saw the
grandest display of all these different kinds of fish which it has
ever been my fortune to meet with. In my journal, written on that day,
I find some things related of which I have scarcely any recollection,
and certainly have never witnessed since. A bonito, it appears,
darted out of the water after a flying-fish, open-mouthed, and so true
was the direction of his leap that he actually closed with the chase
in the air, and sought to snap it up; but, owing to some error in his
calculation, the top of his head striking the object of pursuit, sent
it spinning off in a direction quite different from that which his own
momentum obliged him to follow. A number of those huge birds, the
albatrosses, were soaring over the face of the waters, and the
flying-fish, when rising into the air to avoid the dolphins and
bonitos, were frequently caught by these poaching birds, to the very
reasonable disappointment of the sporting fish below. These intruders
proceeded not altogether with impunity, however; for we hooked several
of them, who, confident in their own sagacity and strength of wing,
swooped eagerly at the baited hooks towed far astern of the ship, and
were thus drawn on board, screaming and flapping their wings in a very
ridiculous plight. To render this curious circle of mutual destruction
quite complete, though it may diminish our sympathy for the persecuted
flying-fish, I ought to mention