It was the 27th of December when the three boats left the sand-bank with the remainder of the men, and began a voyage of two thousand miles, towards the island of Juan Fernandez. The mate’s boat was picked up, about three months after, by the ship Indian of London, with only three living men in it. About the same time the captain’s boat was discovered, by the Dauphin of Nantucket, with only two men living; and these unhappy beings had only sustained life by feeding on the flesh of their dead comrades. The third boat must have been lost, for it was never heard of; and out of the whole crew of twenty men, only five returned home to tell their eventful story.
Before resuming the thread of my narrative, I must not omit to mention, that in the head of the sperm whale there is a large cavity or hole called the “case,” which contains pure oil that does not require to be melted, but can be bailed at once into casks and stowed away. This is the valuable spermaceti from which the finest candles are made. One whale will sometimes yield fifteen barrels of spermaceti oil from the “case” of its head. A large fish will produce from eighty to a hundred-barrels of oil altogether, sometimes much more; and when whalemen converse with each other about the size of whales, they speak of “eighty-barrel fish,” and so on.
Although I have written much about the fighting powers of the sperm whale, it must not be supposed that whales are by nature fond of fighting. On the contrary, the “right” whale is a timid creature, and never shows fight except in defence of its young. And the sperm whale generally takes to flight when pursued. In fact, most of the accidents that happen to whalemen occur when the wounded monster is lashing the water in blind terror and agony.
The whale has three bitter enemies, much smaller, but much bolder than himself, and of these he is terribly afraid. They are the swordfish, the thrasher, and the killer. The first of these, the swordfish, has a strong straight horn or sword projecting from his snout, with which he boldly attacks and pierces the whale. The thrasher is a strong fish, twenty feet long, and of great weight. Its method of attack is to leap out of the water on the whale’s back, and deal it a tremendous blow with its powerful tail.
The swordfish and thrasher sometimes act together in the attack; the first stabbing him below, and the second belabouring him above, while the whale, unable, or too frightened to fight, rushes through the water, and even leaps its whole gigantic length into the air in its endeavours to escape. When a whale thus leaps his whole length out of the water, the sailors say he “breaches,” and breaching is a common practice. They seem to do it often for amusement as well as from terror.
But the most deadly of the three enemies is the killer. This is itself a kind of small whale, but it is wonderfully strong, swift, and bold. When one of the killers gets into the middle of a school of whales, the frightened creatures are seen flying in all directions. His mode of attack is to seize his big enemy by the jaw, and hold on until he is exhausted and dies.