The whole charge entered one of the great spiracles, or blow-holes, which are situated in the middle of the head, about sixteen feet from the nose, and through which this fish can spout to a vast height when wounded or annoyed. The moment the gun was fired, our whale sunk like a stone.
"There he goes, for ever I hope!" cried Hartly.
"We have not seen the last of him, sir," said old Hans, as he got astride the boom of the fore-and-aft mainsail in his excitement to see the whale again; "he has a long way to go down, before he'll come up again. Why, Lord love you, sir, I have known them in the sound of Yell, when struck by a harpoon, descend head-foremost for eight hundred fathoms, (at the rate of eight knots an hour, till the line in the bowpost smoked, ay, blazed with friction,) and then come up with their jawbones broken, by running foul of a rock at the bottom. That one has gone down fully four hundred fathoms."
"How do you know, Hans?"
"By the eddy—he'll be up to blow, directly."
"Where?" said I.
"On our weather beam, I think. See! there are the bubbles of his blowing already!"
Hans was right; even while he spoke, the whale rose to the surface, about fifty yards from us, and from his blow-holes shot a vast spout of water streaked with blood into the air, and then it pattered like rain as it fell into the sea. After lashing the water furiously with his tail till it boiled in foam around him, and the air above became filled with vapour, he threw himself into a perpendicular position, and stood for a moment like a pillar, from the sea.
It was a strange and exciting scene!
He now flapped his mighty flukes, which were perhaps thirty feet apart, till they cracked like a gigantic whip, and then sank from our gaze in a deep eddy, around which the concentric waves heaved and broke for a considerable time; but we saw him no more.