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This extraordinary creature had no fins so far as could be seen, but propelled itself solely by its tail, which it moved with such wonderful rapidity as rendered it utterly impossible to detect the shape of it.
But the whale irritated, instead of being enervated by its wounds, recommenced its furious conduct. The sea was in a foam. Its tail and fins wore in awful play; and in a short time, harpoon after harpoon drew out, the fish was loosened from its entanglements and escaped. In the fishery of 1812, the Henrietta of Whitby suffered a similar loss.
The difference between swimming and flying was merely the difference between the revolutions of the screws and the inclination of the fins. A thousand raised her from the water: twelve hundred gave her twenty-five or thirty miles an hour through the air: fifteen hundred gave her fifty, and two thousand gave her eighty to a hundred, according to the state of the atmosphere.
Another, endeavoring to pull the oar, felt his hands shrink up and presently to be no longer hands but fins; another, trying to raise his arms to a rope, found he had no arms, and curving his mutilated body, jumped into the sea. What had been his legs became the two ends of a crescent-shaped tail.
The majority of them had two fins just behind the gill slits, typical fish tails and blunt, sloping heads. But now and then I saw a spined monster that was queerly unlike its fellows. Instead of two front fins, these unique ones had two vacant round holes. The head looked as though it had forgotten to grow; its place was taken by an eyeless, projecting, shield shaped cap. And there was no tail.
Two negroes died of the cold. Their corpses floated many hours near the boat as if unable to separate themselves from it. Then they were drawn under by an invisible tugging, and some triangular fins passed over the water's surface, cutting it like knives at the same time that its depths were darkened by swift, ebony shadows.
The bones, heads, and fins of fish, containing a portion of isinglass, may also be very usefully applied, by stewing them in the water in which the fish is boiled, and adding it to the soup, with the gravy that is left in the dish.
Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for my private table here, the capstan, I'll tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other; that done, dish it; d'ye hear? And now to-morrow, cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by to get the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle.
The superior glutton is the shark, that mouth with fins, that natatory intestine which swallows with equal indifference the dead and the living, flesh and wood, cleanses the waters of life and leaves a desert behind its wriggling tail; but this destroyer brings forth only one shark that is born armed and ferocious ready from the very first moment to continue the paternal exploits, like a feudal heir.
According to the description given to the king by Ohthere, Northmanna-land, or Norway, is very long and narrow, all the land which is fit for pasture or tillage being on the seacoast, which is very rocky in some places. To the east of this, and parallel to the cultivated land, there are wild and huge mountains and moors, which are inhabited by the Fins.
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