broad tail in air, and a blow which might have sufficed to stave in the side of the ship struck the second mate’s boat fairly amidships.  It was right before my eyes, not sixty feet away, and the sight will haunt me to my death.  The tub oarsman was the poor German baker, about whom I have hitherto said nothing, except to note that he was one of the crew.  That awful blow put an end summarily to all his earthly anxieties.  As it shore obliquely through the centre of the boat, it drove his poor body right through her timbers—­an undistinguishable bundle of what was an instant before a human being.  The other members of the crew escaped the blow, and the harpooner managed to cut the line, so that for the present they were safe enough, clinging to the remains of their boat, unless the whale should choose to rush across them.

Happily, his rushing was almost over.  The bomb fired by Mr. Count, with such fatal result to poor Bamberger, must have exploded right in the whale’s throat.  Whether his previous titanic efforts had completely exhausted him, or whether the bomb had broken his massive backbone, I do not know, of course, but he went into no flurry, dying as peacefully as his course had been furious.  For the first time in my life, I had been face to face with a violent death, and I was quite stunned with the awfulness of the experience.  Mechanically, as it seemed to me, we obeyed such orders as were given, but every man’s thoughts were with the shipmate so suddenly dashed from amongst us.  We never saw sign of him again.

While the ship was running down to us, another boat had gone to rescue the clinging crew of the shattered boat, for the whole drama had been witnessed from the ship, although they were not aware of the death of the poor German.  When the sad news was told on board, there was a deep silence, all work being carried on so quietly that we seemed like a crew of dumb men.  With a sentiment for which I should not have given our grim skipper credit, the stars and stripes were hoisted half-mast, telling the silent sky and moaning sea, sole witnesses besides ourselves, of the sudden departure from among us of our poor shipmate.  We got the whale cut in as usual without any incident worth mentioning, except that the peculiar shape of the jaw made it an object of great curiosity to all of us who were new to the whale-fishing.  Such malformations are not very rare.  They are generally thought to occur when the animal is young, and its bones soft; but whether done in fighting with one another, or in some more mysterious way, nobody knows.  Cases have been known, I believe, where the deformed whale does not appear to have suffered from lack of food in consequence of his disability; but in each of the three instances which have come under my own notice, such was certainly not the case.  These whales were what is termed by the whalers “dry-skins;” that is, they were in poor condition, the blubber yielding less than half the usual quantity of oil.  The absence of oil makes it very hard to cut up, and there is more work in one whale of this kind than in two whose blubber is rich and soft.  Another thing which I have also noticed is, that these whales were much more difficult to tackle than others, for each of them gave us something special to remember them by.  But I must not get ahead of my yarn.