This whale, as it chanced, was sighted at early morning; and this was as well. A big bull, the creature lay quietly, just awash, while the captain's boat came upon it from behind. He stirred not at all till Noll Wing swung hard on the long steering oar and brought them in against the black side and bellowed to Silva: "Let go! Let go the irons!" Silva knew his work as well as any man; and he got both harpoons home to the hitches, and threw the line clear as the bull leaped bodily forward and upward, half out of the water, and whirled in a smothering turmoil of spray and tortured foam to escape the blades that bit him. Noll swung them out of his way, shouted to Silva: "Aft, now! Let me be at him, man...." And Silva came stumbling back across the thwarts to take the steering oar, while Noll went forward and chose his lance and braced himself in the bow. The whale, his first torment dulled, had stopped his struggle and lay still, swinging slowly around in the water. It was as though he looked about to discover what it was that had attacked him; and old Tichel--the other boats were standing by in a half circle about Noll and the whale--bawled across the water: "'Ware, sir. He's looking for you." Noll heard and waved his hand defiantly; and at the same time, the whale saw Noll's boat and charged it. The whale, as has been said, would be invulnerable if his wit but matched his bulk. It does not. Furthermore, the average whale will not fight at all, but runs; and it is his efforts to escape that blindly cause the damage, and even the tragedies of the fisheries. But when he does attack, he attacks almost always in the same way. The sperm whale, the cachalot, trusts to his jaw; he bites; and his enemy is not the men in the boat, but the boat itself. Perhaps he cannot see the men; his eye is small and set far back on either side of his great head. Certainly, when once a boat is smashed, it is rare for a whale to deliberately try to destroy the men in the water. The sperm whale tries to bite; the right whale--it is from him your whalebone comes--strikes with his vast flukes. He will lie quietly in the water and brush his flukes back and forth across the surface, feeling for his enemy. If his flukes touch a floating tub, an oar, a man, they coil up like an enormous spring, and slap down with a blow that crushes utterly whatever they may strike. The whalemen have a proverb: "'Ware the sperm whale's jaw, and the right whale's flukes." And there is more truth than poetry in that. When a sperm whale destroys a boat with his flukes, it is probably accident; but he bites with malice prepense and pernicious. The whale which Noll had struck set out to catch Noll's boat and smash it in his jaws.