had taken on a new form. Deep-sea
whaling, as it was called, to distinguish it from the shore fisheries, had
begun long ago. Capt. Christopher Hursey, a stout Nantucket whaleman,
cruising about after right whales, ran into a stiff northwest gale and was
carried far out to sea. He struck a school of sperm-whales, killed one,
and brought blubber home. It was not a new discovery, for the sperm-whale
or cachalot, had been known for years, but the great numbers of right
whales and the ease with which they were taken, had made pursuit of this
nobler game uncommon. But now the fact, growing yearly more apparent, that
right whales were being driven to more inaccessible haunts, made whalers
turn readily to this new prey. Moreover, the sperm-whale had in him
qualities of value that made him a richer prize than his Greenland cousin.
True, he lacked the useful bone. His feeding habits did not necessitate a
sieve, for, as beseems a giant, he devoured stout victuals, pieces of
great squids--the fabled devil-fish--as big as a man's body being found in
his stomach. Such a diet develops his fighting qualities, and while the
right whale usually takes the steel sullenly, and dies like an overgrown
seal, the cachalot fights fiercely, now diving with such a rush that he
has been known to break his jaw by the fury with which he strikes the
bottom at the depth of 200 fathoms; now raising his enormous bulk in air,
to fall with an all-obliterating crash upon the boat which holds his
tormentors, or sending boat and men flying into the air with a furious
blow of his gristly flukes, or turning on his back and crunching his
assailants between his cavernous jaws. Descriptions of the dying flurry of
the sperm-whale are plentiful in whaling literature, many of the best of
them being in that ideal whaleman's log "The Cruise of the Cachalot," by
Frank T. Bullen. I quote one of these:

"Suddenly the mate gave a howl: 'Starn all--starn all! Oh, starn!' and the
oars bent like canes as we obeyed--there was an upheaval of the sea just
ahead; then slowly, majestically, the vast body of our foe rose into the
air. Up, up it went while my heart stood still, until the whole of that
immense creature hung on high, apparently motionless, and then fell--a
hundred tons of solid flesh--back into the sea. On either side of that
mountainous mass the waters rose in shining towers of snowy foam, which
fell in their turn, whirling and eddying around us as we tossed and fell