"You must know, that about ten years ago I was an apprentice aboard a small whaler, a ninety-ton schooner, out of Peterhead. We were returning in very low spirits after an unsuccessful voyage, and, by stress of weather, were forced toward the rocky and dangerous coast of Norway, where we came to anchor one evening in a solitary bay, among the rugged islets which stud the mouth of the Hardanger-fiord, to repair some trifling damages. As day broke, there was a shout raised by the watch on deck.
"'A whale!—a whale!—in the shoal water!'
"And there, sure enough, far up the bay, we saw one sporting and gambolling, blowing and diving; and though it was a kind of robbery, perhaps, we resolved to make a dash at him, for the place was lonely, and not a Norwegian eye upon us—not a house upon the shore, nor a man upon the mountains, so far as we could discern by our glasses.
"The boats were cleared, the harpoons prepared, the lines were coiled away in the tubs, and the schooner was hove short on her anchor; but just as we lowered the whaling-punts, down dived our fish, tail uppermost, and then we knew that he was searching for his favorite food, of which plenty is to be found in these Norwegian fiords."
"What is it?" said I.
"A kind of small salt-water snail, and the medusa, or sea-blubber. As you have been at Eton, you must have read all about it in Linnæus," continued our learned Scotch mate. "Just as the first boat was lowered, the schooner received a shock so violent that her masts strained almost to snapping; her bows were dragged down till her billet-head dipped in the water, and every thing and everybody on deck went toppling and tumbling forward in a heap about the windlass bitts. Then a shower of bloody spray fell over us as the craft righted again, but with such violence that the water splashed under the counter and over the quarter. Then she was torn through the sea at the rate of thirty knots an hour!
"We had scarcely time to form an idea, or to utter an exclamation, either of surprise or fear, when we saw, a cable's length right ahead, an immense whale, the same fish we were preparing to attack, rushing through the waves with railway speed, and dragging us after him by our anchor, of the flukes of which he had somehow run foul in his gambols down below."
"What! do you mean to say that the whale ran off with the schooner?" I exclaimed, in astonishment.
"Just as a scared dog runs away with a kettle at his tail. It was one of the blunt-headed cachalots, about sixty feet long. They are the most hideous fish of the whole whale species, having a head that is enormously thick, and one third of their entire size, the spout-hole being at the fore end of it.
"In less time than I have taken to tell you all this, we were dragged out of the fiord; its rocks of black basalt and its sombre pine woods lessened astern; its entrance seemed to close like a gate as it blended with the coast; and the schooner, with her loose foretopsail all aback against the mast, was dragged in the wind's eye (whales usually swim so) for more than twenty miles out to sea. Then the cachalot raised its mighty head about ten feet from the water, spouted a jet of froth into the air, and disappearing, sunk, leaving our anchor swinging or drifting in the deep water, at the full length of the chain cable."