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Updated: June 16, 2025
"Ah!" said he, "that animal goes quicker than the Abraham Lincoln. Very well! we will see whether it will escape these conical bullets. Send your men to the forecastle, sir." The forecastle gun was immediately loaded and slewed round. But the shot passed some feet above the cetacean, which was half a mile off.
No doubt, on board the Abraham Lincoln, when the Canadian struck it with the harpoon, Commander Farragut had recognised in the supposed narwhal a submarine vessel, more dangerous than a supernatural cetacean. Yes, it must have been so; and on every sea they were now seeking this engine of destruction. Terrible indeed! if, as we supposed, Captain Nemo employed the Nautilus in works of vengeance.
Only one amongst us, Conseil, seemed to protest by his indifference against the question which so interested us all, and seemed to be out of keeping with the general enthusiasm on board. I have said that Captain Farragut had carefully provided his ship with every apparatus for catching the gigantic cetacean. No whaler had ever been better armed.
The crew of the frigate and the various scientists on board were all eagerness to meet the great cetacean, or sea-unicorn. My own opinion was that it would be found to be a narwhal of monstrous growth, for these creatures are armed with a kind of ivory sword, or tusk, as hard as steel, and sometimes nearly seven feet long by fifteen inches in diameter at the base.
As I said, Commander Farragut had carefully equipped his ship with all the gear needed to fish for a gigantic cetacean. No whaling vessel could have been better armed. We had every known mechanism, from the hand-hurled harpoon, to the blunderbuss firing barbed arrows, to the duck gun with exploding bullets.
He differs from that great cetacean, though, in a most important particular; i.e. by having a complete set in both upper and lower jaws, like any other carnivore. For a carnivore indeed is he, the very wolf of the ocean, and enjoying, by reason of his extraordinary agility as well as comparative worthlessness commercially, complete immunity from attack by man.
Imperfection of the Record. Calcaire Silicieux. Gres de Beauchamp. Calcaire Grossier. Miliolite Limestone. Soissonnais Sands. Lower Eocene of France. Nummulitic Formations of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Eocene Strata in the United States. Gigantic Cetacean. Map of the principal Eocene areas of North-western Europe, showing: Shaded dotted: Hypogene rocks and strata older than the Devonian.
The pursuit of this "royal fish" as the ancient chroniclers call him in contented ignorance of the fact that he is not a fish at all had not, indeed, originated in New England, but had been practised by all maritime peoples of whom history has knowledge, while the researches of archeologists have shown that prehistoric peoples were accustomed to chase the gigantic cetacean for his blubber, his oil, and his bone.
Seemingly, the moment this enormous narwhale came up to breathe at the surface of the ocean, air was sucked into its lungs like steam into the huge cylinders of a 2,000-horsepower engine. "Hmm!" I said to myself. "A cetacean as powerful as a whole cavalry regiment now that's a whale of a whale!" We stayed on the alert until daylight, getting ready for action.
Another curiosity in the order is the tooth of the Narwhal, a modest cetacean, who is not much more than twenty feet long! I speak of the tooth, because the creature has commonly but one; a cylindrical-pointed tooth, spirally furrowed, whose length varies from six to ten feet, and which comes straight out from the extreme front of the upper jaw, like a soldier's pike.
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