"So much for history. Now we'll talk about whales.
SPERM-WHALE.
"There are several kinds of them—sperm-whales, right-whales, bow-heads; and a whaleman can tell one from the other as easy as a farmer can tell a cart-horse from a Shetland pony. The most valuable is the sperm-whale, as his oil is much better, and brings more money; and then we get spermaceti from him to make candles of, which we don't get from the others. He's a funny-looking brute, as his head is a third of his whole length; and when you've cut it off, there doesn't seem to be much whale left of him.
"I sailed for years in a sperm-whaler in the South Pacific, and had a good many lively times. The sperm-whale is the most dangerous of all, and the hardest to kill; he fights with his tail and his mouth, while the others fight only with their tails. A right-whale or a bow-head will lash the water and churn it up into foam; and if he hits a boat with his tail, he crushes it as if it was an egg-shell. A sperm-whale will do all this, and more too; he takes a boat in his mouth, and chews it, which the others never do. And when he chews it, he makes fine work of it, I can tell you, and short work, too.
"Sometimes he takes a shy at a ship, and rushes at it, head on. Two ships are known to have been sunk in this way; one of them was the Essex, which the whale ran into three times, and broke her timbers so that she filled. The crew took to the boats, and made for the coast of South America. One boat was never heard from, one reached the coast, and the third was picked up near Valparaiso with everybody dead but two, and those barely alive. Provisions and water had given out, and another day would have finished the poor fellows. Another ship was the Union, which was stove right under the bows by a single blow from a sperm-whale, and went down in half an hour.
"I was fifteen years old when I pulled my first oar in a whale-boat; I was boat-steerer at eighteen, and second mate at twenty, and before I was twenty-one I had known what it was to be in the mouth of a sperm-whale. It is hardly necessary to say that I got out of it as fast as I could, and didn't stop to see if my hair was combed and my shirt-collar buttoned. A man has no time to put on frills under such circumstances.