we saw it lying exhausted on the surface of the
water, and being gradually swept nearer and nearer the shore by the swift-
flowing tide. The mother refused to leave her little one however, and
still continued to wheel round it continuously, even when it had reached
dangerously shallow water.

The result was that when the tide turned, both the mother and her calf
were left stranded high and dry on the beach, to the unbounded delight
and amazement of the natives, who swarmed round the leviathans, and set
up such a terrific uproar, that I verily believe they frightened the
mother to death. In her dying struggle she lashed the water into a
perfect fury with her tail, and even made attempts to lift herself bodily
up. Furious smoke-signals were at once sent up to summon all the tribes
in the surrounding country--enemies as well as friends. Next day the
carcasses were washed farther still inshore--a thing for which the blacks
gave me additional credit.

I ought to mention here that the loss of my boat was in some measure
compensated for by the enormous amount of prestige which accrued to me
through this whale episode. To cut a long story short, the natives fully
believed that _I had killed single-handed and brought ashore both
whales_! And in the _corroborees_ that ensued, the poets almost went
delirious in trying to find suitable eulogiums to bestow upon the mighty
white hunter. The mother whale surpassed in size any I had ever seen or
read about. I measured her length by pacing, and I judged it to be
nearly 150 feet. My measurements may not have been absolutely accurate,
but still the whale was, I imagine, of record size. As she lay there on
the beach her head towered above me to a height of nearly fifteen feet.
Never can I forget the scene that followed, when the blacks from the
surrounding country responded to the smoke-signals announcing the capture
of the "great fish." From hundreds of miles south came the natives,
literally in their thousands--every man provided with his stone tomahawk
and a whole armoury of shell knives. They simply swarmed over the
carcasses like vermin, and I saw many of them staggering away under solid
lumps of flesh weighing between thirty and forty pounds. The children
also took part in the general feasting, and they too swarmed about the
whales like a plague of ants.

A particularly enterprising party of blacks cut an enormous hole in the
head of the big whale, and in the bath of