No wonder that “nearly every whaling captain who rounded Cape Horn, if he possessed any professional ambition, or valued himself on his skill in subduing the monarch of the seas, would lay his vessel along the coast, in the hope of having an opportunity to try the muscle of this doughty champion, who was never known to shun opponents.” No wonder, either, that his fame went so far. “From the effect of age, or more probably from a freak of nature, ... he was white as wool. Instead of projecting his spout obliquely forward, and puffing with a short, convulsive effort, as usual with his species, he flung the water from his nose in a lofty, perpendicular, expanded volume, at regular and somewhat distant intervals; its expulsion producing a continuous roar, like that of vapour struggling from the safety-valve of a powerful steam engine. Viewed from a distance, the practised eye of the sailor only could decide that the moving mass which constituted this enormous animal was not a white cloud sailing along the horizon.” In time Mocha Dick’s back came to be serried with irons which had pierced his mighty hide and his wake was tangled with yards of line which he had broken in his rush or which had been cut off by desperate whalers to keep their boats from being dragged under water. Caution, too, entered that head with the barnacles clustered hard and tight upon it; he learned to present his back to the harpooner and to guard his “small” and the softer area under his fins. But with so many allies against him he finally met his fate. Attacked in his last battle, off the coast of Chile, he charged the boat at the first encounter and frightened the harpooner into missing him and then, on being accused of fear, of plunging into the water to drown himself for chagrin. Later Mocha Dick, who had been keeping out of sight though suspected to be still near the ship, was angered at the attack which the whalers made upon a calf and its mother and again charged them. This time the first mate made a surer stroke and, after a furious struggle, got his victim. “Mocha Dick was the longest whale I ever looked upon. He measured more than seventy feet from his noodle to the tips of his flukes; and yielded one hundred barrels of clear oil, with a proportionate quantity of ‘head-matter.’”