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Updated: May 9, 2025
Whoever gave utterance to those sounds words they were must be moving onward, coming towards the carcass of the cachalot. How were they coming? They could not be walking upon the water: they must be aboard a ship? This interrogatory occurred to those who stood upon the whale.
Such as it is, however, it possesses many very respectable teeth, of which some weigh as much as two pounds; and with these the cachalot, whose ferocity is tremendous, tears in pieces everything that comes near it, sometimes even the boats of the fishermen who risk their lives in the dangerous pursuit of capturing them.
There he was said to be king of the twin isles; so I suppose he found means to oust his rival, and resume his sovereignty; though, how an American negro, as Sam undoubtedly was, ever managed to gain such a position, remains to me an unfathomable mystery. Certainly he did not reveal any such masterful attributes as one would have expected in him, while he served as harpooner on board the CACHALOT.
There are three kinds of whale; the Greenland, called by the sailors the right whale, as being most highly prized by them; the great northern rorqual, called by fishers the razor-back or finner, and the cachalot or spermaciti whale. The common whale measures from sixty to seventy feet in length: the mouth, when open, is large enough to admit a ship's jolly boat, with all her men in it.
This they cared nothing about: since they had neither the pots to boil, the casks to hold, nor the craft to carry it, even if rendered into oil for the market. But Ben knew that within the skull of the cachalot there was a deposit of pure sperm, that needed no preparation, which would be found of service to them in a way they had already thought of.
The sailor, as he said this, simply nodded toward the sea. It needed no further pointing out to understand what he meant by the phrase "raw meat." Scores of sharks, both of the blue and white species, attended by their pilots and suckers, were swimming around the carcass of the cachalot. The sea seemed alive with them.
Whether from superstition or not I cannot tell, but I never saw any creature injured out of pure wantonness, except sharks, while I was on board the CACHALOT. Of course, injuries to men do not count.
With the Catamaran once more under sail, and going on her due course, her crew might have seemed restored to the situation held by them previous to their encountering the dead cachalot Unfortunately for them, this was far from being the case. A change for the worse had occurred in their circumstances.
"Ah!" exclaimed the Canadian, whose eyes had never left the ocean, "they are coming nearer; they are in the same water as the Nautilus." Then, returning to the conversation, he said: "You spoke of the cachalot as a small creature. I have heard of gigantic ones. They are intelligent cetacea. It is said of some that they cover themselves with seaweed and fucus, and then are taken for islands.
To me it seems a conclusive proof of the enormous numbers of sperm whales frequenting certain large breadths of ocean, that they should be so often fallen in with, remembering what a little spot is represented by a day's cruise, and that the signs which denote almost infallibly the vicinity of right whales are entirely absent in the case of the cachalot.
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