and moved forward to meet his enemy, with ready jaw to grind them to bits.  The captain at the boat-oar, or steering-oar, made a mighty effort and escaped the rush; then sent an explosive bomb into the whale’s vitals as he surged past.  Struck unto death, the great bull went into his flurry; but in dying he rolled over the captain’s boat like an avalanche, destroying it as completely as he had the three others.  So man won the battle, but at a heavy cost.  The whaleman who chronicled this fight says significantly:  “The captain proceeded to Buenos Ayres, as much to allow his men, who were mostly green, to run away, as for the purpose of refitting, as he knew they would be useless thereafter.”  It was well recognized in the whaling service that men once thoroughly “gallied,” or frightened, were seldom useful again; and, indeed, most of the participants in this battle did, as the captain anticipated, desert at the first port.

Curiously enough, there did not begin to be a literature of whaling until the industry went into its decadence.  The old-time whalers, leading lives of continual romance and adventure, found their calling so commonplace that they noted shipwrecks, mutinies, and disaster in the struggles of the whale baldly in their logbooks, without attempt at graphic description.  It is true the piety of Nantucket did result in incorporating the whale in the local hymn-book, but with what doubtful literary success these verses from the pen of Peleg Folger—­himself a whaleman—­will too painfully attest: 

    Thou didst, O Lord, create the mighty whale,
      That wondrous monster of a mighty length;
    Vast is his head and body, vast his tail,
      Beyond conception his unmeasured strength.

    When the surface of the sea hath broke
      Arising from the dark abyss below,
    His breath appears a lofty stream of smoke,
      The circling waves like glittering banks of snow.

    And though he furiously doth us assail,
      Thou dost preserve us from all dangers free;
    He cuts our boats in pieces with his tail,
      And spills us all at once into the sea.

Stories of the whale fishery are plentiful, and of late years there has been some effort made to gather these into a kind of popular history of the industry.  The following incidents are gathered from a pamphlet, published in the early days of the nineteenth century, by Thomas Nevins, a New England whaler: 

“A remarkable instance of the power which the whale possesses in its tail was exhibited within my own observation in the year 1807.  On the 29th of May a whale was harpooned by an officer belonging to the ‘Resolution.’  It descended a considerable depth, and on its reappearance evinced an uncommon degree of irritation.  It made such a display of its fins and tail that few of the crew were hardy enough to approach it.  The captain, observing their timidity, called a boat and himself struck a second harpoon.