After the usual time spent in furious attempts to free himself from our annoyance, he betook himself below, leaving us to await his return, and hasten it as much as possible by keeping a severe strain upon the line.  Our efforts in this direction, however, did not seem to have any effect upon him at all.  Flake after flake ran out of the tubs, until we were compelled to hand the end of our line to the second mate to splice his own on to.  Still it slipped away, and at last it was handed to the third mate, whose two tubs met the same fate.  It was now Mistah Jones’ turn to “bend on,” which he did with many chuckles as of a man who was the last resource of the unfortunate.  But his face grew longer and longer as the never-resting line continued to disappear.  Soon he signalled us that he was nearly out of line, and two or three minutes after he bent on his “drogue” (a square piece of plank with a rope tail spliced into its centre, and considered to hinder a whale’s progress at least as much as four boats), and let go the end.  We had each bent on our drogues in the same way, when we passed our ends to one another.  So now our friend was getting along somewhere below with 7200 feet of 1 1/2-inch rope, and weight additional equal to the drag of sixteen 30-feet boats.

Of course we knew that, unless he were dead and sinking, he could not possibly remain much longer beneath the surface.  The exhibition of endurance we had just been favoured with was a very unusual one, I was told, it being a rare thing for a cachalot to take out two boats’ lines before returning to the surface to spout.

Therefore, we separated as widely as was thought necessary, in order to be near him on his arrival.  It was, as might be imagined, some time before we saw the light of his countenance; but when we did, we had no difficulty in getting alongside of him again.  My friend Goliath, much to my delight, got there first, and succeeded in picking up the bight of the line.  But having done so, his chance of distinguishing himself was gone.  Hampered by the immense quantity of sunken line which was attached to the whale, he could do nothing, and soon received orders to cut the bight of the line and pass the whale’s end to us.  He had hardly obeyed, with a very bad grace, when the whale started off to windward with us at a tremendous rate.  The other boats, having no line, could do nothing to help, so away we went alone, with barely a hundred fathoms of line, in case he should take it into his head to sound again.  The speed at which he went made it appear as if a gale of wind was blowing and we flew along the sea surface, leaping from crest to crest of the waves with an incessant succession of cracks like pistol-shots.  The flying spray drenched us and prevented us from seeing him, but I fully realized that it was nothing to what we should have to put up with if the wind freshened much.  One hand was kept bailing the water out which came so freely over the bows, but all