There was a usage generally observed by whalemen that when a whale was struck, and the harpoon, with the line attached, remained in the whale, but the line did not remain fast to the boat, and a boat’s crew from another ship continued the pursuit and captured the whale, and the master of the first ship claimed the whale on the spot, the whale belonged to the first ship. At last the matter was taken into the United States Court, and the judge held that the usage was a good one and that the whale belonged to the first ship. Two lawsuits arose over whales captured in the Okhotsk Sea. One, as follows: Having killed a bowhead, the first mate of the whaler anchored the whale in five fathoms of water and attached a waif, intending to return the next day. Early in the morning, boats of another New Bedford whaler towed the whale to their ship, where it was cut-in and boiled down. It turned out that the anchor didn’t hold in the night, that the cable coiled around the whale’s body, and that no waif irons were attached to it. The captain of the vessel whose boat had originally killed the whale visited the other ship and laid claim to the whale; for oil and bone worth five thousand dollars or more were not to be given up without something more than a protest. If the captain of the vessel which had the oil and the bone had yielded, the bone could easily have been then delivered, but to turn over great casks of oil from one vessel to another, in a rough sea, was not so easy. But the captain wouldn’t yield. The discussion between the two masters was bitter and boisterous. “I killed the whale,” said the captain of the first vessel. “Your first mate says he killed it.” “Now don’t be smart. You know when I said ‘I’, the reference was to my ship.” “Where’s the proof that anybody in your ship killed it?” “Proof enough. Even if the waif was gone, the whale was dead, and I can show that the warp coiled around the body was the warp of my ship.” The captain of the other vessel thundered back, “The whale belongs to this ship, and the oil and bone from him will stay on this ship until we get back to New Bedford, and what are you going to do about it?” “You’ll find out what we are going to do about it when we get back to that port.” And the visiting captain went to his boat. They did find out, for when they returned, the United States Court held that the ship whose first mate killed the whale was entitled to the value of the oil and bone. The subject of the second lawsuit was a bowhead in which we were interested, and a big one, too. Both our vessel and another one laid claim to it. When, on a very fair day for that part of the world, bowheads were sighted, all our boats were lowered. As a rule the captain of a whaler did not go in a boat, but remained on the ship with the cooper, steward, cook, spare hands and so forth. But now and then the captain would take a hand in whaling.