Fighting the Whales

There are few things in this world that have filled me with so much astonishment as the fact that man can kill a whale! That a fish, more than sixty feet long, and thirty feet r...

My first few days on the ocean were so miserable that I oftentimes repented of having left my native land. I was, as my new friend Tom Lokins said, as sick as a dog. But in cour...

It was in the forenoon of a most splendid day, about a week after we arrived at that part of the ocean where we might expect to find fish. A light nor'-east breeze was blowing,...

The scene that took place on board ship after we caught our first fish was most wonderful. We commenced the operation of what is called "cutting in", that is, cutting up the wha...

The scenes in a whaleman's life are varied and very stirring. Sometimes he is floating on the calm ocean, idling about the deck and whistling for a breeze, when all of a sudden...

As the reader may, perhaps, have been asking a few questions about the whale in his own mind, I shall try to answer them, by telling a few things concerning that creature which,...

One day I was standing beside the windlass, listening to the conversation of five or six of the men, who were busy sharpening harpoons and cutting-knives, or making all kinds of...

The whale which we had taken, as I have related in the last chapter, was our largest fish of that season. It produced ninety barrels of oil, and was worth about 500 pounds, so t...

Shoregoing people have but little notion of the ease with which the heart of a jack-tar is made to rejoice when he is out on a long voyage. His pleasures and amusements are so f...

"Joking, Mother, I was never more in earnest in my life. Why, I tell you that I've seen, aye, and helped to cut up, whales that were more than sixty feet long, with heads so big...