There were already sharks about the carcass, half a dozen or more, attracted in some mysterious way. They had come in with it; had appeared with the first blood. It took some little manœuvring to get the carcass in proper position close along the starboard side, where the cutting-stage is rigged, the flukes forward, and the head about at the gangway. Then a line with a sinker attached was dropped between the ship and the body of the whale. Beyond the sinker was more line with a float on the end. {153} The sinker was dropped down deep enough to carry the float down clear of the body, then pulled up again, and the float came up beyond the whale. It always does. I never saw it fail. The men in the boat got that line, and hauled in on it, and pulled it all in, and a heavier line attached to its end, and then a chain cable to which the heavy line was fast. They made the chains fast, the fluke chain about the tail at the smallest part, just before it begins to spread into the flukes, so that the carcass would turn in it freely. The flukes sometimes measure, from point to point, as much as twenty feet. We began cutting-in at once. It was already well on into the afternoon when we began, and within a couple of hours we sighted Mr. Baker’s boat returning dejectedly, without their whale. The men soon came aboard, rather crestfallen. Peter told me that the shank of one iron twisted off, and the other pulled out. The whale was still going too fast for the boat, and there was nothing to be done except to come back. “Best we could do, we could n’t heave in hard enough to get close,” he said. “Then Mr. Baker tried pitchpoling.” “How do you pitchpole, Peter?” I asked. “Pitchpole?” said Peter. “Why, the shaft of a lance is light, of pine or some light wood, and you take it under the end on your hand, with the other hand to guide it. Then you toss it in the air blade first. Of course you aim at the whale. You must ’a’ done the same thing with a stick or an arrow many a time. The head being heavy and the shaft light, the blade ’ll keep ahead. If you ain’t too far off, and if you ’re any kind of a shot, it ’ll come down into the whale, but the aim ain’t certain. It can’t be. You haul the lance back by the warp that ’s fast to the shaft. Mr. Baker missed him clean the first time. He must ’a’ been making twelve knots, right into the wind. The second shot just tickled his flukes, and he gave such a powerful start that the first iron twisted off as if it had {154} been made of cheese. That first iron had been doing all the pulling, and when it went that brought a sudden strain on the second iron, and it ripped out. So there we were, and there was the whale leaving us at a mile a minute, more or less. We came back.”