I could not see the new spouts, of course, from my place {329} on deck, and I sprang into the fore rigging, clasping my old glass, which I had brought up with me after breakfast. Many others of the men swarmed up, but I was first, and I went rapidly up as far as I could get, and put the glass to my eyes. I did not see them at first, for it was about four bells—ten o’clock in the forenoon—I was looking to the eastward, directly into the glare, and I was expecting to see them nearer than they were; but at last I saw them. There were many spouts in the air at once over a wide arc of the sea; and the sun shining on them all, and glorifying them into tiny ostrich plumes, each on Ann McKim’s hat. Every time that I saw a sperm whale’s spout with the sun shining upon it, I thought of that hat of Ann McKim. Ann McKim was a few months older than I—she is yet, although that fact is not generally published—and when I left home she had just got her first plumed hat. It was a big, broad-brimmed hat of dark blue satin—or velvet, I do not know which—with a generous white ostrich plume sticking up from the brim at just the angle of a sperm whale’s spout. I know she had bought it with her own money, and had trimmed it herself, for she told me so. No doubt such a hat was absurd, especially on a girl of fifteen, but it did not seem absurd to her, nor to me when I saw her with it on, the Sunday before I came away. But Ann McKim was sweet and lovely, and she would have lent beauty to any hat she chose to wear. The large school of whales did not seem to be going anywhere in particular as a body, although the individuals of the school continually moved about, or sounded, or came up again. They may have been feeding. The bull and the wounded cow and calf which we had been chasing were evidently meaning to join the school, and we followed them, getting all the boats ready for lowering as we went. We were now getting the full sweep of the trades, steady and strong, and we gained on the three whales, so {330} that we were in a position to see well what happened when they neared the school.