First:  In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket, was cruising in the Pacific Ocean.  One day she saw spouts, lowered her boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales.  Ere long, several of the whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale escaping from the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon the ship.  Dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that in less than “ten minutes” she settled down and fell over.  Not a surviving plank of her has been seen since.  After the severest exposure, part of the crew reached the land in their boats.  Being returned home at last, Captain Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific in command of another ship, but the gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and breakers; for the second time his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith forswearing the sea, he has never attempted it since.  At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of Nantucket.  I have seen Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy; I have read his plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed with his son; and all this within a few miles of the scene of the catastrophe.*

The following are extracts from Chace’s narrative:  “Every fact seemed to warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which directed his operations; he made two several attacks upon the ship, at a short interval between them, both of this catastrophe I have never chanced to their direction, were calculated to do us the whale hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions to it.

Thirdly:  Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J—–­then commanding an American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be dining with a party of whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich Islands.  Conversation turning upon whales, the Commodore was pleased to be sceptical touching the amazing strength ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen present.  He peremptorily denied for example, that any whale could so smite his stout sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful.  Very good; but there is more coming.  Some weeks later, the Commodore set sail in this impregnable craft for Valparaiso.  But he was stopped on the way by a portly sperm whale, that begged a few moments’ confidential business with him.  That business consisted in fetching the Commodore’s craft such a thwack, that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest port to heave down and repair.  I am not superstitious, but I consider the Commodore’s interview with that whale as providential.  Was not Saul of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright?  I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.

I will now refer you to Langsdorff’s Voyages for a little circumstance in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof.  Langsdorff, you must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral Krusenstern’s famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present century.  Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter: