When I reached the deck, the skipper called me, and said several things that made me feel about six inches taller.  He was, as may be thought, exceedingly pleased, saying that only once in his long career had he seen a similar case; for I forgot to mention that the line was entangled around the cow’s down-hanging jaw, as if she had actually tried to bite in two the rope that held her consort, and only succeeded in sharing his fate.  I would not like to say that whales do not try to thus sever a line, but, their teeth being several inches apart, conical, and fitting into sockets in the upper jaw instead of meeting the opposed surfaces of other teeth, the accomplishment of such a feat must, I think, be impossible.

The ship being now as good as anchored by the vast mass of flesh hanging to her, there was a tremendous task awaiting us to get the other fish alongside.  Of course they were all to windward; they nearly always are, unless the ship is persistently “turned to windward” while the fishing is going on.  Whalers believe that they always work up into the wind while fast, and, when dead, it is certain that they drift at a pretty good rate right in the “wind’s eye.”  This is accounted for by the play of the body, which naturally lies head to wind; and the wash of the flukes, which, acting somewhat like the “sculling” of an oar at the stern of a boat, propel the carcass in the direction it is pointing, Consequently we had a cruel amount of towing to do before we got the three cows alongside.  Many a time we blessed ourselves that they were no bigger, for of all the clumsy things to tow with boats, a sperm whale is about the worst.  Owing to the great square mass of the head, they can hardly be towed head-on at all, the practice being to cut off the tips of the flukes, and tow them tail first.  But even then it is slavery.  To dip your oar about three times in the same hole from whence you withdrew it, to tug at it with all your might, apparently making as much progress as though you were fast to a dock-wall, and to continue this fun for four or five hours at a stretch, is to wonder indeed whether you have not mistaken your vocation.

However, “it’s dogged as does it,” so by dint of sheer sticking to the oar, we eventually succeeded in getting all our prizes alongside before eight bells that evening, securing them around us by hawsers to the cows, but giving the big bull the post of honour alongside on the best fluke-chain.

We were a busy company for a fortnight thence, until the last of the oil was run below—­two hundred and fifty barrels, or twenty-five tuns, of the valuable fluid having rewarded our exertions.  During these operations we had drifted night and day, apparently without anybody taking the slightest account of the direction we were taking; when, therefore, on the day after clearing up the last traces of our fishing, the cry of “Land ho!” came ringing down from the crow’s-nest, no one was surprised, although the part of the Pacific in which we were cruising has but few patches of Terra Firma scattered about over its immense area when compared with the crowded archipelagoes lying farther south and east.