Two of the boats are able to approach near enough to allow lances to be thrown at him, which, penetrating through the blubber, pierce his vitals, and cause him to run again as swiftly as before. Again he sinks, and again appears on the surface; the column which he now spouts forth is tinged with red. The boats again approach, the more lances are driven into his sides, but he is not yet subdued; he breaks away from the assassins, and tries once more to escape; but, alas! his strength and his life-blood are fast ebbing away; his breath begins to fail, and he cannot remain long beneath the surface. He comes up suddenly in the very midst of the boats, and, as he rolls from side to side, he strikes one of them with his fin, staving it in and making it a wreck upon the water. The drowning men are picked up by their companions, and the whale is again pursued. He is now in the death-flurry, spinning round and round, and lashing the sea into foam with his broad tail. He is still; and now the boats venture to come close up to the carcase, and fixing grapnels in it, with tow-lines attached, they form in a line, and commence towing their conquest to the shore, singing as they row, their measured paeans of victory. When the blubber is cut off and tryed out, it produces from three to ten tons of oil. Besides whales, there are immense quantities of fish upon this coast. The best kind are called tailors, and have a good deal of the mackerel flavour; and snappers, which somewhat resemble cod-fish. The mullets and whitings are better than those on the English coast, but every other fish is much inferior in flavour to those known in England. We have nothing to equal salmon, turbot, soles, cod, or mackerel; nevertheless, a snapper of twenty pounds weight is a very eatable fish. They are caught in great quantities, salted and exported to the Mauritius, where they are acknowledged to be superior to the fish imported from the Cape of Good Hope. Snapper-fishing is not bad sport, as they bite freely. They go in immense shoals, and it is not an uncommon thing to catch twenty-hundred weight at a single haul. When H.M.S. Challenger was lying in Cockburn Sound, some of the men with a very large seine-net, caught two thousand fish at a single haul -- averaging five pounds a-piece. This is almost incredible, but it is related on good authority. The fresh-water rivers have no fish but a small craw-fish, that buries itself in the ground when the bed of the stream is dry; and a flat-headed, tapering fish called a cobbler. This is about twelve inches long, and has a sharp, serrated bone an inch in length on each side of its head, that lies flat and perfectly concealed until an enemy approaches. This bone is hollow, like an adder's tooth, and contains a virulent poison, which is injected into the wound, and causes intense pain for several hours. Men are frequently stung by these wretches, whilst wading through the water.