re taken aboard the ship. The breeze
was fresh, and against us, so the top-gallant sails were taken in, the
courses hauled up, and the topsails clewed down, yet, I assure you, that
whale towed the ship dead against the wind for an hour and a half at the
rate of two miles an hour, and all the while beating the water with his
fins and tail, so that the sea was in a continual foam. We did not kill
that fish till after forty hours of the hardest work I ever went
through."

Some of my shipmates seemed to doubt the truth of this story; but, for
my part, I believed it, because the mate was a grave, truthful man,
though he was gruff, and never told lies, as far as I knew. Moreover, a
case of the same kind happened some years afterwards, to a messmate of
mine, while he was serving aboard the _Royal Bounty_, on the 28th of May
1817.

I know that some of the stories which I now tell must seem very wild and
unlikely to landsmen; but those who have been to the whale-fishery will
admit that I tell nothing but the truth, and if there are any of my
readers who are still doubtful, I would say, go and read the works of
Captain Scoresby. It is well known that this whaling captain was a
truly religious man, who gave up the fishing, though it turned him in
plenty of money, and became a minister of the gospel with a small
income, so it is not likely that he would have told what was untrue.
Well, in his works we find stories that are quite as remarkable as the
one I have just told, some of them more so.

For instance, he tells us of one whale, in the Greenland Seas, which was
not killed till it had drawn out ten thousand four hundred and forty
yards, or about _six miles_ of line, fastened to fifteen harpoons,
besides taking one of the boats entirely under water, which boat was
never seen again.

The mate told us two or three more stories, and a lot of us were
gathered round him, listening eagerly, for there is nothing Jack likes
so much as a _good yarn_, when all of a sudden, the man at the mast-head
sang out that a large sperm whale was spouting away two points off the
lee-bow. Of course we were at our posts in a moment.

"There she blows! there she breaches!" sung the look-out.

"Lower away!" roared the captain.

The boats were in the water, and the men on their seats in a moment.

The whale we were after was a very large one; we could see that, for
after two hours' hard pulling we got near enough to throw a harpoon, and
afte