A harpoon was not a toasting-fork to throw in the days when men oftener threw the iron by muscle instead of powder. It is a shod, with a heavy wooden pole five or six feet in length fastened into the socket of the iron barb. This, with the line attached, makes a weight requiring for the cast the use of both arms, and strong arms at that. A man would not care to carry a harpoon more than a mile in a hot day. Its own weight, as much as the impelling force, is depended on to bury itself in the floating mound of seemingly polished India-rubber which constitutes a whale above water. And when it first buries itself, there is for a few seconds some vicious splashing and ugly flirting of fluke or fin. A whale’s tail is an instrument of offence of about one hundred horse power, and well adapted to cutting through a boat as a table knife goes through an egg shell. The two fins suggest members between paddles and rudimentary arms. It is also a member very capable of striking out from the right or left shoulder, and striking very hard. When a half-dozen men are within six feet of these weapons, controlled by an enormous black sunken mass, eighty or one hundred feet long, they are apt to look a trifle wild and their eyes have a tendency to bulge. There are stories among whalemen of boat-steerers who have had all the grit permanently taken out of them by the perils and catastrophes of that moment. A New Londoner once had the cap swept from his head by the sweep of the whale’s tail over it, and he was too nervous for boat service ever afterward. It is no skulking fight, like shooting lions and tigers from the shelter of trees or rocks. It’s a fair standup combat between half a dozen men in an egg-shell of a boat on the open sea, and sometimes on heavy ocean billows, and 500 tons of flesh, bone, and muscles, which, if only animated by a few more grains of sense, could ram the whaleship herself as effectually as an ironclad. As a murderous spectacle the capture and killing of a whale, as seen even by a sea-cook from the galley window, is something ultra-exciting. It makes one’s hair stand upon both ends.