Newman and I had already gone in the boats, and had proved ourselves no bad oarsmen on the occasion. He, indeed, had been allowed by the captain to use the harpoon when one of the officers was ill, and had succeeded in striking his first fish in a way which gained him much credit. On this occasion, however, we both remained on board.
Suddenly, not far from the ship, another whale rose to the surface, and, in a most extraordinary manner, began to turn, and twist, to throw half his huge bulk at a time out of the water, and furiously to lash it with his tail till he was surrounded with a mass of foam. The boats were in another direction, or we should have thought he had been wounded, and had a lance or harpoon sticking in him, from which he was endeavouring to free himself. He swam on, however, and approached the ship, still continuing his extraordinary contortions. As he drew near, he lifted his enormous head out of the water, when we saw hanging to his lower jaw a large fish, twenty feet long or so, from which he was thus in vain endeavouring to free himself! We had no little cause to be alarmed, as he drew near, for the safety of the ship herself; for, in the blindness of his agony, he might unintentionally strike her, or he might rush against her side to get rid of his pertinacious enemy. More than once the whale threw himself completely out of the water; but the fish still hung on to his bleeding jaw. Together they fell again into the sea, while all around them was stained of a crimson hue from the blood so copiously flowing from the worried monster.
“That’s a killer!” cried old Tom. “He’ll not let go the whale till he has him in his flurry, and then he and his mates will make a feast of him. They have great strong teeth, bigger than a shark’s, and are the most voracious fish I ever saw. They bait a whale just as dogs do a wild beast, or a bull, and seldom fail to kill him if they once get hold of him.”
This killer had a long dorsal fin, and a brown back and white belly. On came the whale and the fish, twisting and turning as before. We all stood ready to try and send them off—though very little use that would have been, I own. Happily they floundered by just astern of the ship; but so violent were their movements, and by such a mass of foam and blood were they surrounded, that it was difficult to observe the appearance of the killer. Equally impossible would it have been to have approached the whale to harpoon him without an almost certainty of losing the boat and the lives of all her crew. We could, therefore, only hope that the whale might be conquered when still within sight, so that the boats might carry off the prize from the relentless killer. Away went the monster and his tormentor. Soon we could no longer distinguish them from the deck; but on going aloft, we again caught sight of them, still floundering on as before.
“That fish gives us a lesson of what pertinacity will accomplish, even in conquering the greatest of difficulties,” observed Newman, laughing. “I admire the way in which he sticks to his object. He has made up his mind to kill the whale, and kill the whale he will.”
“Ay, and eat him too, Ned, as he deserves,” said old Knowles. “Some of us might learn a lesson from that fish, I’m thinking.”
“I have been killing whales all my life,” Newman remarked to me with a forced laugh. “But somehow or other, Jack, I never have found out how to eat them.”
“Overcoming difficulties, but not benefiting by them!” said I. “There must be a fault somewhere.”
“Ay, Jack, ay—a fault in myself, and a curse well-deserved,” he answered, bitterly, and then was silent. I never before had heard him speak in that way, and I did not venture to ask for an explanation.
That saying of Newman became common ever afterwards on board, when we saw a man determined to do a thing—“Kill the whale he will!”