“Still the whale held right on off the coast, and we had nothing but to fold our arms and look on, wondering when the tough, pliable irons would break or draw out—or looking for him to sound, which, you know, would cause us to cut the tow-line. The axe was ready in the second mate’s hands, and we were already in the strength of the current, which he took tail on, increasing his speed, of course, toward some old sleeping haunt of his, as I thought, possibly in the Gulf of Mageira, under the lee of some low island or coral reef. The oldest whaleman in the ship could not wonder enough at the strength of the monster—a hundred feet long, as he was, and more. He neither yawed nor slackened his pace, but kept straight on to double the sandy point broad on our larboard bow by this time. It was a strange thing, to be sure, to feel the ship slipping along, stern on to the current, with a man standing soberly at the wheel to steady it, all her sails furled, and the whale’s flukes kicking up a white dust ahead, like one of Loper’s screw-propellers. Parker told me a story of a vessel in the Greenland seas being towed by a ‘right whale’ for an hour and a half, in the teeth of a strong breeze, with the yards brailed aback; so that, at that rate, there was no estimating the powers of a full-grown ‘finner,’ a much larger and more powerful fish of the two; he might tow us entirely clear of the coast, provided the harpoons did not break off at the ‘withers,’ or ‘draw,’ which last, the mate said, was the way in which the matter was likely to end. Indeed, the event proved his knowledge of the habits and resources of this species, as we doubled the point safely enough, at the distance of two miles, in sight of a body of horsemen, who pulled up from their useless chase, on the very edge of the strand.