“In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the
whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed:  there—­pointing to the sea—­is a green pasture where our children’s grand-children will go for bread.” 
  —­OBED MACY’S HISTORY OF NANTUCKET.

  “I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the
form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale’s jaw bones.” 
  —­HAWTHORNE’S TWICE TOLD TALES.

  “She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been
killed by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years ago.” 
  —­IBID.

  “No, Sir, ’tis a Right Whale,” answered Tom; “I saw his sprout; he
threw up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at.  He’s a raal oil-butt, that fellow!”
  —­COOPER’S PILOT.

  “The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that
whales had been introduced on the stage there.” 
  —­ECKERMANN’S CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE.

  “My God!  Mr. Chace, what is the matter?” I answered, “we have been
stove by a whale.” 
  —­“NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALE SHIP ESSEX OF
NANTUCKET, WHICH WAS ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY
A LARGE SPERM WHALE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN.”  BY OWEN
CHACE OF NANTUCKET, FIRST MATE OF SAID VESSEL.  NEW
YORK, 1821.

    “A mariner sat in the shrouds one night,
      The wind was piping free;
    Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale,
    And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale,
      As it floundered in the sea.” 
  —­ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH.

“The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture of this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six English miles. ...

  “Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which,
cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four miles.” 
  —­SCORESBY.

  “Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the
infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head, and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him with vast swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed.
  ...  It is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of
the habits of so interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, so important an animal (as the Sperm Whale) should have been so entirely neglected, or should have excited so little curiosity among the numerous, and many of them competent observers, that of late years, must have possessed the most abundant and the most convenient opportunities of witnessing their habitudes.” 
  —­THOMAS BEALE’S HISTORY OF THE SPERM WHALE, 1839.

  “The Cachalot” (Sperm Whale) “is not only better armed than the True
Whale” (Greenland or Right Whale) “in possessing a formidable weapon at either extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a disposition to employ these weapons offensively and in manner at once so artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as the most dangerous to attack of all the known species of the whale tribe.” 
  —­FREDERICK DEBELL BENNETT’S WHALING VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, 1840.