The Wide World Magazine, Vol. 22, No. 131, February, 1909

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
Vol. XXII. FEBRUARY, 1909. No. 131.
Another instalment of a fascinating budget of adventure narratives. This month we publish accounts of a fight to the death between a whale and a school of thresher sharks; a nest-robber’s terrible battle with an infuriated mother-eagle; and the nerve-trying experience which befell a Surrey cyclist while out for a Saturday afternoon spin.
Early on the morning of August 14th last, while engaged in building new quarters for the lighthouse-keeper at Breaksea Island, near Rottnest, Western Australia, the contractor and his men noticed a bull whale, with a cow and calf, passing the island some distance off. They watched them with interest for awhile, noting the immense size of the two parents and the methodical regularity with which columns of water rose from their blowholes, and then resumed their labours.
An hour or so later—about nine o’clock, to be exact—the men were startled by an extraordinary noise, apparently coming from the eastern end of the island, a noise unlike anything they had ever heard before. Dropping their tools and staring towards the east, they beheld such a sight as it falls to the lot of few people to witness. There, not five hundred yards from the shore, was being waged a battle to the death—a fight between the great cow whale previously seen and a school of thresher sharks. The calf was swimming about distractedly, but the old bull had disappeared, having basely deserted his family at the first approach of danger.
The sharks, as though acting in accordance with some preconcerted plan, had completely surrounded the two whales, and, apparently realizing that nothing was to be feared from the calf, concentrated all their efforts upon the cow. Again and again they charged in upon her, their jaws snapping, tearing at her mighty sides until the sea was red with blood. Meanwhile the cow lashed her tail furiously, hurling up sheets of reddened water and occasionally crashing down with terrific force upon one of her voracious opponents. Maddened with pain and rage, she dashed this way and that, but the sharks hung to her side with a persistency and ferocity that made the fascinated onlookers shudder. Now and again the wildly-lashing tail would catch one of the assailants, driving it beneath the waves—no doubt killed or disabled—but the remainder rushed in undismayed, tearing viciously at the mammal’s bleeding flanks or butting her with the force of battering-rams.