Up to this point it had not seemed to be a propitious time for lowering, but when the fight was over, Mr. Tilton lowered at once, and went after the vanquished bull. He was still moving slowly, and the boat easily overtook him, and got fast. He made no fight at all, but lay fin out in fifteen minutes. His jaw was hanging down queerly, and when we got him alongside and began to cut-in, we found that it had been broken short off, and was hanging by the flesh. Many of his teeth were stove out, and he had terrible wounds in the head. Meanwhile the ship had kept off after the school, which began to show signs of moving along. We got pretty near it, however, and lowered three more boats, but we did not succeed in getting whales of any size. The school consisted principally of rather small cows, under the charge of two or three bulls as schoolmasters. We could not find the bull which had been fighting, and did not look for the others, for schoolmasters are always pugnacious devils. They have to be. We managed to get three small cows of about twenty barrels apiece before the school was well under way and left us. One of these cows was lost during the night, stripped by sharks and broken adrift, and much of another fell a prey to the sharks. Four whales at once {332} alongside is almost too much to take care of. We got the blubber all hove in by sunset of the next day, and the carcasses cut adrift. They made only a hundred and twelve barrels altogether, only about as much as we might have expected to get from one really big whale in those waters. {333} CHAPTER XXXIV As soon as the trying-out was finished, we stood off to the southeast, or a little southerly of that. The trades here were blowing strong from the east, and that was as close as the Clearchus would sail. After a day of this, we came about on the other tack. We could none of us understand why, unless some of the officers did, but the large school of whales had disappeared almost directly to windward, and Captain Nelson may have been trying to see where they had gone. There was a fairly rapid drift of the surface water, also from the east, as would be expected. Although I knew practically nothing about it, I had formed the theory that whales generally travelled against the warmer ocean currents. I had not carried my theory so far as to account for their doing so, but I supposed it had to do with the food supply. That seems reasonable now, for it is at the bottom of all migrations; not comfort, nor pleasure, but food, and the ease of getting it.