icing blow from the
two-handed razor-edged 'spade.' Perhaps the most wonderful of all
exceptional escapes was that of a boat which was towed by one whale
right over the back of another. And perhaps the most exciting finish
to any international race was the one in which the Yankee, who came up
second, got 'first iron' by 'pitchpoling' clear over the intervening
British boat, whose crew were nearly drowned by this 'slick' Yankee's
flying warp.

No wonder old whalemen despise the easier and safer methods of steam
whaling practised by the Norwegians in Canadian and other waters at the
present day. And yet steam whaling is not without some thrilling
risks. The steamers are speedy, handy, small, about one hundred tons
or so, with the latest pattern of the explosive harpoon gun originally
invented by Sven Foyn in 1880. The range is very short, rarely over
fifty yards. The harpoon may be compared to the stick of an {169}
umbrella, with four ribs that open when the bomb in the handle explodes
inside the whale, which it thus anchors to the steamer. The whole
steamer then plays the whale as an angler plays a fish, letting out
line--sometimes two miles of it--towing with stopped engines at first,
and then winding in while giving quarter, half, and three-quarter speed
astern, as the steamer gains on the whale. Even a steamer, however,
has been charged, stove, and sunk. And a fighting humpback in the Gulf
of St Lawrence is no easy game to tackle with a hand-lance in a pram.
Norwegians are thrifty folk, and bomb harpooning is expensive. So when
the whale and steamer meet, at the end of the chase, a tiny pram is
launched with two men rowing and a third standing up in the stern to
wield the fifteen-foot lance. As the humpback's flippers are also
fifteen feet long, and as they thrash about with blows that have sunk
several prams and killed more than one crew, it still requires the
fittest nerves and muscles to give the final stroke.

But whaling, in this and every other form, is bound to come to an
untimely end very soon unless the whales are protected by international
game laws rigidly enforced. At present the only protection is the
exhaustion of a whaling {170} ground below a paying yield; when whaling
stops till the whales breed back. But soon they won't breed back at
all. Modern steam whaling spares no kind of whale in any kind of sea.
It has one good point. It is more humane, as a rule. But the odds
against the wha