as soon as we knew they were up, the male was fast. The shoal ‘squandered’[6]—some running toward Gentoo, and some coming down toward the ship. I was so eager to head off these last, when the captain sung out to me from the crosstrees to lower away, that I forgot all about the weather, thinking only of the fish, as you may easily understand, if you have any notion of the heat into which things of this sort put a whaleman. However, it was not until I had my whale spouting his last to leeward of the ship, that the squall came down on us sharp as a knife—cutting off the heads of the seas before it, and nearly swamping the boat, as we labored to keep her close under the whale’s lee. After he turned up we kept head to sea, until the ship came driving down in the thick of it, with her three topsail-yards on the caps, and luffing up to the gust, brought us close under her lee, so that we managed to hook on and scramble inboard, just as the rain came down in a solid sheet.’ “‘You saw no more of the mate, then?’ I asked, as he stopped short, jerking the stump of his sheroot into the scum which floated round the rudder, and staring at the birds which darted after it, and then at the Arab cruiser, in an earnest, yet vacant way, which showed that his mind, being full of his tale, or something at the bottom of it, took no more note of the craft, at the moment, than if she had been up the Ganges. “‘No, sir,’ he answered slowly, ‘for it was thick and squally for a day or two afterward, and we had nearly lost the ship the same day, on a coral-reef. There was a grab-brig in sight to windward at the time, and we had hopes that she might have picked up the mate’s boat, only that Captain Catherton swore that he saw the whale run it under before the squall shut them in; which, as the third mate, who was aloft at the time, afterwards said, showed that his glass must have had devilish sharp eyes.’ “‘Well,’ said I, as he stopped short again, with a world of meaning in his sharp face, ‘I commanded that grab, and I must say your ship was handled well to have steered clear that time. We saw no more of you after the squall struck us, and really it seems to me that Captain Catherton did the best he could under the circumstances; since if he had kept his luff, instead of bearing away before it, it’s more than probable he would have lost two boats’ crews, in place of one.’ “‘Very true,’ said he, in a negative sort of a way; ‘but then, I doubt the truth of the captain’s report that the whale took the boat under. The third mate was on the topgallant-crosstrees, with his glass fixed on the boat, when they put their helm up in the ship, and he says that the fish never sounded at all. No man in his senses would have sent away a boat in such weather; and it was the very first time on the v’y’ge that the starboard quarter-boat—the captain’s own—hung at the cranes, and the main-yard aback for a shoal of whales within half a mile of the ship.’