his tormentors, or sending boat and men flying into the air with a furious blow of his gristly flukes, or turning on his back and crunching his assailants between his cavernous jaws.  Descriptions of the dying flurry of the sperm-whale are plentiful in whaling literature, many of the best of them being in that ideal whaleman’s log “The Cruise of the Cachalot,” by Frank T. Bullen.  I quote one of these: 

“Suddenly the mate gave a howl:  ‘Starn all—­starn all!  Oh, starn!’ and the oars bent like canes as we obeyed—­there was an upheaval of the sea just ahead; then slowly, majestically, the vast body of our foe rose into the air.  Up, up it went while my heart stood still, until the whole of that immense creature hung on high, apparently motionless, and then fell—­a hundred tons of solid flesh—­back into the sea.  On either side of that mountainous mass the waters rose in shining towers of snowy foam, which fell in their turn, whirling and eddying around us as we tossed and fell like a chip in a whirlpool.  Blinded by the flying spray, baling for very life to free the boat from the water, with which she was nearly full, it was some minutes before I was able to decide whether we were still uninjured or not.  Then I saw, at a little distance, the whale lying quietly.  As I looked he spouted and the vapor was red with his blood.  ‘Starn all!’ again cried our chief, and we retreated to a considerable distance.  The old warrior’s practised eye had detected the coming climax of our efforts, the dying agony, or ‘flurry,’ of the great mammal.  Turning upon his side, he began to move in a circular direction, slowly at first, then faster and faster, until he was rushing round at tremendous speed, his great head raised quite out of water at times, slashing his enormous jaws.  Torrents of blood poured from his spout-hole, accompanied by hoarse bellowings, as of some gigantic bull, but really caused by the laboring breath trying to pass through the clogged air-passages.  The utmost caution and rapidity of manipulation of the boat was necessary to avoid his maddened rush, but this gigantic energy was short-lived.  In a few minutes he subsided slowly in death, his mighty body reclined on one side, the fin uppermost waving limply as he rolled to the swell, while the small waves broke gently over the carcass in a low, monotonous surf, intensifying the profound silence that had succeeded the tumult of our conflict with the late monarch of the deep.”

[Illustration:  “SUDDENLY THE MATE GAVE A HOWL—­’STARN ALL!’”]

Not infrequently the sperm-whale, breaking loose from the harpoon, would ignore the boats and make war upon his chief enemy—­the ship.  The history of the whale fishery is full of such occurrences.  The ship “Essex,” of Nantucket, was attacked and sunk by a whale, which planned its campaign of destruction as though guided by human intelligence.  He was first seen at a distance of several hundred yards, coming full speed for the ship.  Diving,