After Park’s death, and when a biographical sketch of this most amiable and persevering of travellers was in the course of preparation, one of this circle of friends, whose memory for such things was known to be very retentive, was applied to for these suppressed anecdotes, the existence of which had, somehow or other, leaked out. After a moment’s reflection, he said—
“No!—I won’t tell you one word of them. If my friend Park, in his soberest and most reflecting moments, considered it proper to keep these things out of his book, and only betrayed them even to his intimates, over a glass of toddy, I don’t see that we should be acting a generous part by his memory to publish them after he is gone, however true we are convinced they must be.”
After preparing the above adventure of the whale’s leap for the press, I felt, on Park’s principle, a certain hesitation as to trusting it before the public; but in order to fortify myself by an authority of the highest rank in whaling matters, I sat down and wrote the following letter to my friend Captain Scoresby:—
“More than twenty-eight years ago, I saw a whale leap right out of the sea, in Murray’s anchorage at Bermuda. The depth of water, if I recollect right, was about ten fathoms, and he had, somehow or other, got inside the barrier of coral reefs which gird these islands on the north. When the whale was at his greatest elevation, his back may have been twenty or thirty feet above the surface of the water, and at that moment he was in a horizontal position. His length could not have been less, I should imagine, than fifty or sixty feet. As I never saw such a thing before or since, I am a little afraid of relating it, and have no mind to risk my credit by telling a story too big to be swallowed by the average run of gullets, however true in point of fact. You will oblige me, therefore, very much, by telling me whether, in the course of your extensive experience, you have seen one or more such incidents. If not, I fear my story of the whale’s jump at Bermuda must be kept out of a little work I am now preparing for the use of young folks. But if I have your authority to back me, the anecdote shall stand, and so take its chance for being valuable in the way of information.”
To this I received the following reply from Captain Scoresby, who, as all the world will admit, is the highest authority on such questions:—
“Liverpool, 25th August, 1830.
“And now having come to the subject, which, I allow, is one of magnitude, I have much pleasure in being able to speak to the point, in attestation of the not infrequency of the exhibition of the huge leaps which you witnessed, however ignorance might charge it as ‘very like a whale.’ Whilst engaged in the northern whale fishery, I witnessed many similar exploits of the whales in their frisks. Generally, they were of a middle size; but I think I have seen instances of full-grown fish, of forty or fifty feet in length, forgetting their usual gravity, and making out these odd exhibitions of their whole form from head to tail. Certainly, I have several times seen whales leap so high out of the water as to be completely in air, which, reckoning from the surface of the back (the real extent of the leap), could scarcely be less than twenty feet, and possibly might be more. I have, at different times, gone in pursuit of these frolicsome fish; but in all cases they avoided either catastrophe—the leaping upon the boat, or allowing the boat to pull upon them.
“By the way, whilst the breathing of the whale has been magnified into a resemblance of water-works, to the abuse of the credulous, the frolic feats of the leaping whales have been neglected as a source of interest. In referring to my account of the arctic regions, I perceive the fact is named, but with little commentary for general amusement.”[1]