approached I could scarce credit the evidence of my own sight. The
form of one of the vessels was perfect. She was of an antique build,
and belonged to a period that I reckoned was full eighty years dead
and gone. The other--the half of her I should say--showed a much
bluffer bow, and had been a vessel of some burthen. But the wonder was
the object on which they rested. This was no more nor less than the
body of a great dead whale!

We first needed to lose something of our amazement ere we could
reasonably speculate upon what we saw; then how this had happened grew
plain to our minds. The two craft, God knows how many long years
before, had been in action and foundered in conflict. The smaller
vessel--I mean the one that lay whole before us--might have been a
privateersman; she had something of a piratical sheer forward, there
were no signs of a mast aboard either of them, one had grappled the
other to board her I dare say, and they had both gone to the bottom
linked. The vessel of which only half remained may have broken her
back in settling, and, by-and-bye, the after part of her drifted away,
leaving the dead bows still gripped by the dead enemy alongside. But
how came the whale there? Well, we three men reasoned it thus, and I
don't doubt we were right. At the moment of the sea-quake the whale
was stemming steadily towards the two wrecks resting on the bottom.
They were lifted by the explosion, which at the same time killed the
whale; but the impetus of the vast form slided it to under the lifted
keels, where it came to a stand. A dead whale floats, as we know. This
whale being dead was bound to rise, and the buoyancy of the immense
mass brought the two craft up with it, and there they were, poised by
the gleaming surface of the whale, which was depressed by their
weight, so that no portion of the head, tail, or fluke was visible.

"It's them vessels being connected," says Jackson, "as keeps them
afloat. If what holds them together forrard was to part they'd slide
off that there slipperiness and sink."

We rowed close, the three of us greatly marvelling, as you may
suppose, for never had the like of such an incident as this happened
at sea within the knowledge of ever a one of us, and Fallows alone was
a man of five and forty, who had been using the ocean for thirty-three
years. It was as scaring as the rising of a corpse out of the
depths--as scaring as if that corpse turned to and spoke when his head
showed,--t