with greater rapidity below the surface. The skin of the whale
is perfectly smooth, though old bulls get rough marks about them. As a
rule, though black above and white below, as they advance in years, like
human beings, they get grey on the head. Oftentimes an old grey-headed
bull proves a dangerous enemy.

I have with greater minuteness than I intended given an account of the
sperm whale. Its habits and mode of capture I will describe in the
course of my narrative.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

INCIDENTS OF WHALING.

Away, away the good ship flew to round the far-famed Cape Horn. Stern
and majestic it rose on our starboard-hand; its hoary front, as it
looked down on the meeting of two mighty oceans, bore traces of many a
terrific storm. Now all was calm and bright, though the vast
undulations of the ocean over which the ship rode, as they met the
resistance of the cliffs, were dashed in cataracts of spray high up in
the air, and gave evidence of what would be the effect when a storm was
raging across them. There was something more grand in the contemplation
than in the actual appearance of the scene, when we reflected where we
were--on the confines of those two great seas which encompass the earth,
and which wash the shores of nations so different in character--the one
having attained the height of civilisation, the other being still sunk
in the depths of a barbarism too terrible almost for contemplation, as I
afterwards had good reason to know. Then there was that strange, vast,
dreamy swell--the breathings, as it were, of some giant monster. It
seemed as if some wondrous force were ever acting on that vast body of
water--that it could not for a moment rest quiet in its bed, but must
ever go heaving on, in calm and sunshine as well as in storm and
tempest. There was likewise in sight that wild weather-beaten shore,
inhabited, as report declared, by men of gigantic stature and untameable
fierceness; while to the south lay those mysterious frost-bound regions
untrod by the foot of man--the land of vast glaciers, mighty icebergs,
and wide extended fields of ice. On we sped with a favouring breeze,
till we floated calmly on the smooth surface of the Pacific off the
coast of Chili.

With regard to Patagonia, old Knowles told me he had been there, but
that, as far as he saw, the people were not much larger than the
inhabitants of many other countries. Some were big men; a few nearly
seven feet high, and propo