"So he gives orders to lower away three boats. These boats were to spread out in running down on the whale, so that if he sounded he might come up so near one of the outside ones as to give it a chance to go on before he could recover from his surprise. Well, we had the outside berth on the port side, and the mate of the _Two Cousins_ he had the middle. The orders were to keep abreast in sailing down, and by easing and trimming sheets, according as we went ahead or not, we managed to do it pretty neatly. We had got down within two hundred and fifty yards of the whale, when he began to swim ahead. He didn't seem to go very fast, but he managed to keep us all about the same distance astern of him. All of a sudden our boat-steerer says, "'I know him!' "'Get out!' says I; 'how can you know a whale?' "'But I tell you I do,' says he, 'and if you had any sense you'd know him too.' "'How would I?' asks I. "'Don't you see the harpoon sticking out of him?' "I looked pretty hard, and, sure enough, there was a harpoon, with a line drifting from it. "'That's my iron!' says the boat-steerer. "'Get out!' says I. "'I won't,' says he. "'How do you know it's yours?' says I. "'Because I made it myself, and I know my own work even when I see it afloat on a whale's back away off in longitude and latitude something or other.' "'Then it's the same whale!' says I. "'Right!' says he. 'It's the whale I struck the other day, and which got away because you went out and cut the line.' "'It would be a pretty good joke on the whale,' says I, 'if we could get close enough to him to catch hold of the end of the line.' "'It would,' says he,' and we could begin again where we left off yesterday.' "'Shall we try it?' I asks. "'Of course,' says he. "'He's stopped swimming ahead,' says I. "'Then we'll soon be close to him,' says he. "'But if he don't swim ahead the end of the line'll sink,' says I. "'And we'll go on and heave a new iron into him,' says he, 'and so we'll get him anyway.' "Well, we sailed on, and occasionally the whale would swim ahead a little, and then again he'd stop, and we'd gain on him. By-and-by we got pretty close, and the boat-steerer says: "'Let's make a dash now and make fast to him with the new iron.' "With that we got the oars out, and with a jump and a snort we sent the light boat boiling ahead. Now in all my life I never saw anything quite as smart as that particular whale. The minute we began to go ahead, so did he. But we were so close that old Bacon, the boat-steerer, made up his mind that we could catch him. "'Pull hard, lads!' he says; 'pull hard! We're gaining on him at every stroke.'