Whaling was a business distinct: the great seasport, to ordinary fishing as a lion-hunt to a partridge-shoot. Early in the seventeenth century Purchas, in his “Pilgrimage” wrote a brave epic of the whale that must have roused many a stay-at-home to hunger for adventure: “I might here recreate your wearied eyes with a hunting spectacle of the greatest chase which nature yieldeth; I mean the killing of a whale.” Freeman says that the method thereof was but “slightly altered during upwards of two centuries.” Here, substantially, is Purchas: “When they espy him on the top of the water, they row toward him in a shallop, in which the harpooneer stands ready with both hands to dart his harping iron, to which is fastened a line of such length, that the whale may carry it down with him; coming up again they again strike him with lances made for the purpose about twelve feet long, and thus they hold him in such pursuit, till after streams of water, and next of blood, cast up into the air and water, he at length yieldeth his slain carcass to the conquerors.” “The proportions of this huge leviathan deserves description,” chants Purchas. “His head is the third part of him, his mouth (O, hellish wide!) sixteen feet in the opening, and yet out of that belly of hell yielding much to the ornaments of our women’s backs. This great head hath little eyes like apples and a little throat not greater than for a man’s fist to enter. They are swallow-tailed, the extremes being twenty feet distant.” He labors for accuracy: “The ordinary length of a whale is sixty feet, and not so huge as Olaus hath written, who also maketh the moose as big as an elephant.”