Boylike, I fancied that all whales on this ground must be very fierce. If I had any fear, it was only for a moment, for I was anxious to hear the glad cry from aloft and to be ordered to the boat. Just a week from the day when we reached the ground came the welcome announcement, and all the boats were lowered. The whales were to the windward and pretty far off. Lustily we pulled, but as it happened the other boats led. There is sometimes luck or chance in the pursuit of whales, and so it was with us. A whale made a kind of detour and gave us a splendid advantage. We approached the creature in very much the same way as we had formerly approached the whale we had lost. The boat-steerer threw both irons successfully and we got out of the suds and avoided the awful sweep of the great flukes. The whale sounded, and the warp passed out quickly but not so fast as to draw the boat’s stem very near to the surface. At last the line slacked, and we were ordered to haul in, hand over hand. As we did so, the line was coiled in a wide heap in the stern sheets, as in the wet state it would not lie very close. When the whale reappeared we were ordered to take the oars, and, when we reached the great black object, Lakeum drove the lance between the third and fourth ribs into his vitals. We pulled away, and the monster began to thrash like an animal in a fit; the water was crimson, and jets of blood at least six feet high leaped from the spout hole. They gradually diminished until the blood merely oozed from it. The whale made a final breach, fell on his side with a fearful splash and lay dead in his own blood and a lather of foam. Then came the cry, “Fin out!” Lakeum ran the lance into the whale’s eye, to make sure he was dead, and then the tow-line was made fast to a slit cut in the spout hole. Here let me say that the whales we captured didn’t all die in the same way. I remember one whale whose head rose and fell in the last struggle, while the flukes beat the water rapidly and vigorously. I remember more than one whale that performed the “flurry,” that is, swam for a few minutes in a circle, to the peril of the men in the boat—that is, “milled”—and then rolled on his side, dead. The whale we had just killed did, before death, what sperm whales nearly always do. He threw up the contents of his stomach, consisting of pieces of cuttlefish. As I looked at the monster, I thought of the saying of Melville, quoted wherever whaling was carried on, and likely to be quoted so long as any one cares for the story of the enterprise, “A dead whale or a stove boat.”