“I don’t rightly know, Tim,” he answered. “Whales always leave a slick—a smooth place, oily-like—on the water when they round out and sound quietly. It must be something like the oil bags we had over our bows in that gale off Hatteras. But they say that there ’s a sort of a telegraph between the whale and his slick—as far as I can make out, that there ’s a way the whole school has of knowing if a boat so much as crosses the line between a whale and his slick. So, if a boat gets into the slick, or crosses that line, the whole school goes tearing to windward. It may be so,” he added, shaking his head. “I don’t say it ain’t, for you hear of many curious things at {198} sea that turn out to be true, but it seems a trifle too much like magic to me. So I say that I don’t know anything about it, and that ’s true enough. I don’t.” I laughed. To me it seemed like a fairy tale; but, as Peter had said, you hear of many curious things at sea which turn out to be true, and this might be one of them. If it is true I can think of no possible explanation. I do not know the truth of the matter to this day. A few days later we sighted another spout. Mr. Brown and Mr. Baker lowered for him, for they said that the Prince and Starbuck ought to have another chance. This was a lone whale, which very obligingly waited for us to come up with him, and both boats got fast. He put up no fight at all, and in a quarter of an hour he lay fin out. This was the sort of thing that disgusted me with whaling, and made it seem nothing more than a bloody, dirty business, which tended to brutalize the men who took part in it. A whale should be willing—determined—to fight for his life, if it was worth anything to him. A fight made it all worth while, and the better the fight the more worth while it seemed, to me, at any rate. The prospect of a good fight always did fill me with elation, in spite of myself. I confess that it does even now, in spite of my age and experience, which has been acquired uniformly in the avoidance of fights; but any kind of a fight seems good to me, in my heart of hearts. It is a reprehensible instinct, but it is just as surely an instinct as it is reprehensible according to our modern code.