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We all expected that it wouldn't take five minutes for the vessel to fill and go to the bottom, and we made ready to take to the boats; but it turned out we didn't need to take to no boats, for as fast as the water rushed into the hold of the ship, that whale drank it and squirted it up through the two blow-holes in the top of his head, and as there was an open hatchway just over his head, the water all went into the sea again, and that whale kept working day and night pumping the water out until we beached the vessel on the island of Trinidad the whale helping us wonderful on our way over by the powerful working of his tail, which, being outside in the water, acted like a propeller.

I don't think his editorial columns are for sale, and he doesn't believe there are blow-holes in my steel plates. I really do believe we have certain convictions.

As he does so he exhales the air from his lungs through blow-holes or spiracles at the top of his head; and this warm, moist air, coming thus from his lungs into the cool air, condenses, forming a jet of vapor looking like a fountain, though there is, in fact, no spout of water. "There she blows! B-l-o-o-o-ws! Blo-o-ows!" cries the lookout at this spectacle.

Its body was forty feet long, and twenty feet round at the thickest part. Its head, which seemed to me a great, blunt, shapeless thing, like a clumsy old boat, was eight feet long from the tip to the blow-holes or nostrils; and these holes were situated on the back of the head, which at that part was nearly four feet broad. The entire head measured about twenty-one feet round.

The whole hillside, with its body of brown and flashes of yellow, was just like a colossal yellow-hammer. The little harbour opened from the sea between towering cliffs, and behind a lonely rock, pierced with many caves and blow-holes through which the sea in storm time sent its thunderous voice, together with a fountain of drifting spume.

Sending two thick spouts of frothy water out of his blow-holes forty feet into the air with tremendous noise, he fell flat upon the sea with a clap like thunder, tossed his flukes or tail high into the air, and disappeared. I was so amazed at this sight that I could not speak. I could only stare at the place where the huge monster had gone down. "Stand by to lower," shouted the captain.

They are warm-blooded animals and not fish at all, so they must come to the top of the waves for air to breathe. The air and water spout out through "blow-holes" on top of the whale's head, and rise like steam in the colder air. The children's mother told them that the whale is the largest of all animals, and that it lives on little jellyfish.

An' we'll sind th' gr-reat Gin'ral Eagan over f'r to larn ye etiquette, an' Andhrew Carnegie to larn ye pathriteism with blow-holes into it, an' Gin'ral Alger to larn ye to hould onto a job; an', whin ye've become edycated an' have all th' blessin's iv civilization that we don't want, that 'll count ye one.

In the winter Kadlu would follow the seal to the edge of this land-ice, and spear them as they came up to breathe at their blow-holes. The seal must have open water to live and catch fish in, and in the deep of winter the ice would sometimes run eighty miles without a break from the nearest shore.

The sea surged in leaping fountains through a thousand blow-holes carved from the black basalt, and the ceaseless wash of the waves had cut the base of the precipices into paniho, or teeth, as the Marquesans say.