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At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he turned upon his back a corpse. While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes, and in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some conversation ensued between them.
Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant, when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance of exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the open air. I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale's flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor.
"At other times," continued the captain, "the ground for the anchor is too soft, instead of being too hard; and the flukes, therefore, do not take a firm hold of it. Then the anchor will drag. Every sea that strikes the ship drives her a little in toward the shore, and she is, of course, in great danger."
A generation later, with his own boy, Jolly, Harrow buttonholed with cornflowers by old Jolyon's whim his grandson had been canonised at a trifle less expense again Jolyon had experienced the heat and counter-passions of the day, and come back to the cool and the strawberry beds of Robin Hill, and billiards after dinner, his boy making the most heart-breaking flukes and trying to seem languid and grown-up.
Turning quickly round, we saw the flukes of an enormous whale sweeping through the air not more than six hundred yards astern of us. "Down your helm," roared the captain; "haul up the mainsail, and square the yards. Call all hands." "All hands, ahoy!" roared Bill Blunt, in a voice of thunder, and in another moment every man in the ship was on deck. "Hoist and swing the boats," cried the captain.
The point of the lance entered just between the fin and the eye, but higher up, missing the broad plate of the shoulder-blade, and sinking its whole four feet over the hitches right down into the animal's vitals. Then, for the first time, he threw up his flukes, thrashing them from side to side almost round to his head, and raising such a turmoil that we were half full of water in a moment.
Dave ceased poling, and all watched the surface for the return of the bladder, as whale-fishers wait for the rising of the great mammal that has thrown his flukes upward and dived down toward the bottom of the sea; but they watched in vain. A minute, two minutes, five minutes, then quite a quarter of an hour, but no sign of the submerged buoy. "Yow two look over the sides," said Dave.
But 'humpy' is almost spent, and though by a mighty effort he 'ups flukes, and sounds, he soon rises, for the killers thrust him upwards to the surface again. Then the flashing lance, two, three swift blows into his 'life, a gushing torrent of hot, dark blood, he rolls over on his side, an agonised trembling quivers through his vast frame, the battle is over and his life is gone.
All the boats but one were on one occasion away with the larger portion of the crew, leaving only the doctor and a few others on board, when they caught sight of an enormous sperm whale coming towards them, as if not seeing the ship; suddenly lifting its flukes up in the air, it sounded, throwing the water over the deck, when they felt a tremendous blow, as if the ship under full sail had struck a rock.
"There was not any money in that," said Don decidedly. "Very much the reverse, I should say," laughed Nealie. "Think of the broken basins, the waste of marmalade and pepper, not to say anything of the damage to our clothes, and all the rest of it. There are flukes and flukes, and our kind, unfortunately, was not the sort that pays.
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