This left us alone fast to the whale. He did not go {179} deep, however, and Mr. Baker was waiting, near us, for him to come up, which he did in about five minutes a few feet ahead of Mr. Baker’s boat. He came up almost vertically, his head and body shooting out of the water, and exposing his side fin. Then he fell over with a tremendous splash; but Mr. Baker had shot his lance into him, and quickly withdrawn it. The shank was bent, but Mr. Baker straightened it by knocking on the gunwale, and let him have it again. Meanwhile we had been taking in our slack line as fast as we could, and when it tautened, heaving in on it to bring us up close enough for Mr. Brown to use his lance. We had not been able to keep the slack ahead of the whale, with all our haste, and he had got a turn around his flukes, like a half hitch, so that we could not shake it loose. It was impossible for us to haul in ahead of his flukes, and lancing them would be no more than an annoyance to the whale, like a mosquito bite. If he should take it into his head to slap that mosquito, it might prove more than an annoyance for us. There was nothing to be done but to slack off the line and try to row up to his side fin, where Mr. Brown wanted to be. We could not have hoped to do this if the whale’s attention had not been taken up with Mr. Baker’s boat. He seemed to attribute all his troubles to that boat, and was putting up a half-hearted sort of a fight; but even a half-hearted fight by a fairly husky whale is not to be taken lightly. Mr. Baker was having his hands full. We pulled up to within a boat’s length, lay there for a few minutes watching for an opening; then, putting all our strength into our oars, we drove the boat in close to the side fin. Mr. Brown plunged the lance in deep, and began churning it slowly up and down, feeling for the heart or the great reservoir of arterial blood near it. The whale had lobtailed once upon feeling the lance, without doing any damage; but in a few strokes Mr. {180} Brown’s lance had found the life. A tremor passed through the great body, a spout rose slowly from his spiracle black with clotted blood, he bestirred himself, and we backed off hastily. He was going into his flurry. That flurry was not an elevating spectacle, but we all watched it. I was fascinated, and so the others seemed to be, all in Mr. Baker’s boat as well as in ours. Our attention for a long time had been so entirely taken up by the whale that not a man of the twelve—counting myself as a man—had looked about him, or been aware of anything but the whale and the two boats, and what was happening there. Suddenly Mr. Baker broke out in a perfect stream of curses. Mr. Brown smiled. “Look!” he said. “Like a bad penny.” We all looked where he pointed. There was the Annie Battles, not a mile away, bearing down directly upon us. Not one of us said a word, but two or three were grinning. It was beginning to seem funny.