“By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day we were out in the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh.  The weather was very clear and fine, but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on our fur clothing.  For some days we had very little wind; it was not till the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the northwest sprang up.  An uncommonly large whale, the body of which was larger than the ship itself, lay almost at the surface of the water, but was not perceived by any one on board till the moment when the ship, which was in full sail, was almost upon him, so that it was impossible to prevent its striking against him.  We were thus placed in the most imminent danger, as this gigantic creature, setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at least out of the water.  The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether, while we who were below all sprang instantly upon the deck, concluding that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we saw the monster sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity.  Captain D’Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether or not the vessel had received any damage from the shock, but we found that very happily it had escaped entirely uninjured.”

Now, the Captain D’Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship in question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village of Dorchester near Boston.  I have the honor of being a nephew of his.  I have particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff.  He substantiates every word.  The ship, however, was by no means a large one:  a Russian craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my uncle after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.

In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure, so full, too, of honest wonders—­the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient Dampier’s old chums—­I found a little matter set down so like that just quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a corroborative example, if such be needed.

Lionel, it seems, was on his way to “John Ferdinando,” as he calls the modern Juan Fernandes.  “In our way thither,” he says, “about four o’clock in the morning, when we were about one hundred and fifty leagues from the Main of America, our ship felt a terrible shock, which put our men in such consternation that they could hardly tell where they were or what to think; but every one began to prepare for death.  And, indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted the ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a little over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground. ...  The suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks.  Captain Davis, who lay with his head on a gun, was thrown out of his cabin!” Lionel then goes on to impute the shock to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate the imputation by stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about that time, did actually do great mischief along the Spanish land.  But I should not much wonder if, in the darkness of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all caused by an unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath.