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Updated: May 9, 2025
We weighed at last, one morning, with a beautiful breeze, and, bidding a long farewell to the lovely isles and their amiable inhabitants, stood at sea, bound for the "line" or equatorial grounds on our legitimate business of sperm whaling. It was now a long while since we had been in contact with a cachalot, the last one having been killed by us on the Coast of Japan some six months before.
The exhibition of endurance we had just been favoured with was a very unusual one, I was told, it being a rare thing for a cachalot to take out two boats' lines before returning to the surface to spout. Therefore, we separated as widely as was thought necessary, in order to be near him on his arrival.
This was a novel experience for us in the CACHALOT, and I was curious to see how she would behave. To my mind, the supreme test of a ship's sea-kindliness is the length of time she will scud before a gale without "pooping" a sea, or taking such heavy water on board over her sides as to do serious damage. Some ships are very dangerous to run at all.
We were evidently in for a fair specimen of Western Ocean weather, but the clumsy-looking, old-fashioned CACHALOT made no more fuss over it than one of the long-winged sea-birds that floated around, intent only upon snapping up any stray scraps that might escape from us.
The prospect of such an encounter could not fail to interest the crew of the whaler; and as they advanced in the direction in which they expected to find the drogued cachalot, all eyes were bent searchingly upon the sea. So far as the dead whale was concerned, they were successful in their search.
It was an excellent idea; and, Ben having communicated it to the others, it was at once determined that it should be carried out. There was no fear of their running short in the staple article of fuel. Ben assured them that the "case" of a cachalot of the largest size, such as the one beside them, often contained five hundred gallons of the liquid spermaceti!
In these objects there was no difficulty in recognising the wreck of the Pandora's raft, which was drifting at no great distance from the place where they had been cutting up the cachalot. The conclusion was easily arrived at.
One cachalot killed, it ran at the next, tacked on the spot that it might not miss its prey, going forwards and backwards, answering to its helm, plunging when the cetacean dived into the deep waters, coming up with it when it returned to the surface, striking it front or sideways, cutting or tearing in all directions and at any pace, piercing it with its terrible spur. What carnage!
Almost at the same moment it began; and there was I, who with fearful admiration had so often watched the titanic convulsions of a dying cachalot, actually involved in them. The turns were off my body, but I was able to twist a couple of turns round my arms, which, in case of his sounding, I could readily let go.
The sperm or cachalot whale is a dangerous and bold fighter and is perhaps the most interesting of all cetaceans. His skin, like that of the porpoise, is as thin as gold-beaters' leaf. Underneath it is a coating of fine hair or fur, not attached to the skin, and then the blubber. He has enormous teeth or tushes in the lower jaw, but has no baleen.
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