I had just started to leave the bridge to go below when the whale spouted about forty fathoms away and it seemed sure that he would rise again within range. The man in the barrel shouted: “There he comes!” and pointed to a spot just beside the port bow. Captain Olsen swung the gun until he was standing almost on the edge of the rope-pan in front. We could see the huge form just under the surface, but it turned down again, leaving a swirling green trail behind it.
“I’d have shot him in the tail if he had only come up,” Captain Olsen shouted, “but we’ll get him yet.”
“The rope attached to the first harpoon floated backward in dangerous proximity to the propeller and it required some careful work to get the animal fast to the bow and the line safely out of the way.”
Shortly afterward the whale blew near us, dead ahead, and as he turned to go down a school of porpoises dashed along beside his back. When he rose a few seconds afterward the porpoises were leaping all about his head, and, bewildered, he did not know which way to turn. We almost reached him but he slid under the water just before the ship came up. For the next few minutes he was lost in the fog and gathering darkness and I shouted to Captain Olsen:
“You’ll never get him. I’m going below.”
“Well, I’ll stand by until it is too dark to shoot,” he answered. “I might get a chance yet.”
Bringing the blue whale to the station. The carcass is almost as long as the ship.
I had hardly reached the cabin and begun pulling off my oilskins when the jerk of the engines told me they must again be close. I ran on deck just as the great brute rounded up right beside the bow and the gun flashed out in the darkness. “Shinda!” yelled the sailors, and through the smoke cloud I could see the whale give a convulsive twist, roll on its side with the fin straight upward, and slowly sink.