CAPTAIN HUNTING'S FIGHT.
"Captain Hunting, of New Bedford, had the worst fight that I know of, while he was on a cruise in the South Atlantic. When he struck the fellow—it was a tough old bull that had been through fights before, I reckon—the whale didn't try to escape, but turned on the boat, bit her in two, and kept on thrashing the wreck till he broke it up completely. Another boat picked up the men and took them to the ship, and then two other boats went in on him. Each of them got in two irons, and that made him mad; he turned around and chewed those boats, and he stuck closely to business until there wasn't a mouthful left. The twelve swimmers were picked up by the boat which had taken the first lot to the ship; two of the men had climbed on his back, and he didn't seem to mind them. He kept on chewing away at the oars, sails, masts, planks, and other fragments of the boats; and whenever anything touched his body, he turned and munched away at it. There he was with six harpoons in him, and each harpoon had three hundred fathoms of line attached to it. Captain Hunting got out two spare boats, and started with them and the saved boat to renew the fight. He got alongside and sent a bomb-lance charged with six inches of powder right into the whale's vitals, just back of his fin. When the lance was fired, he turned and tore through the boat like a hurricane, scattering everything. The sun was setting, four boats were gone with all their gear and twelve hundred fathoms of line, the spare boats were poorly provided, the men were wearied and discouraged, and Captain Hunting hauled off and admitted himself beaten by a whale."
A GAME FELLOW.
The nondescript individual whom we saw among the passengers early in the voyage had joined the party, and heard the story of Captain Hunting's whale. When it was ended, he ventured to say something on the subject of whaling.
"That wasn't a circumstance," he remarked, "to the great whale that used to hang around the Philippine Islands. He was reckoned to be a king, as all the other whales took off their hats to him, and used to get down on their front knees when he came around. His skin was like leather, and he was stuck so full of harpoons that he looked like a porcupine under a magnifying-glass. Every ship that saw him used to put an iron into him, and I reckon you could get up a good history of the whale-fishery if you could read the ships' names on all of them irons. Lots of whalers fought with him, but he always came out first best. Captain Sammis of the Ananias had the closest acquaintance with him, and the way he tells it is this:
"'We'd laid into him, and his old jaw came up and bit off the bow of the boat. As he bit he gave a fling, like, and sent me up in the air; and when I came down, there was the whale, end up and mouth open waiting for me. His throat looked like a whitewashed cellar-door; but I saw his teeth were wore smooth down to the gums, and that gave me some consolation. When I struck his throat he snapped for me, but I had good headway, and disappeared like a piece of cake in a family of children. When I was splashing against the soft sides of his stomach, I heard his jaws snapping like the flapping of a mainsail.