After twenty minutes the rope began slowly to come in, and I went forward with the Captain to the gun platform, waiting for the whale to spout. We saw it at last, but so far away that I thought it was a different animal. The engines had been stopped when the whale was down but now the ship began to move. Faster and faster the vessel tore through the water until Olsen ordered half speed astern. The harpoon had struck the whale in a bad place, for with the iron embedded between his massive shoulders he could pull with all his strength. For half an hour we were dragged through the water and again he sounded. This time he was down ten minutes and came to the surface with a rush which threw half his eighty feet of body into the air. Then he started off at a terrific pace. The Captain did not dare to check his dash and ordered another line to be spliced on when the men called up from below that the rope was almost gone. Three-quarters of a mile of line was out before the animal finally slowed enough so that the winch could hold. Even then, with the engines at full speed astern, the ship was being dragged ahead at nearly six knots an hour. [Illustration: “I ran on deck just as the great brute rounded up right beside the bow and the gun flashed out in the darkness.” ] Our catch next began a series of short dives, followed by frantic rushes from side to side, which lasted two hours. Each time the animal went down the winch ground in a few fathoms of line, sometimes losing it and more on the next mad plunge, but slowly, surely, recovering it foot by foot. At eleven o’clock the whale began to weaken. Every time he rose the stay at the surface was a little longer, his rushes became less violent, and the winch swallowed more and more of the coveted line. With the powerful glasses I could see that at times the water about his back was tinged with red, and knew that the working of the hundred-pound harpoon between his shoulders was making an ugly wound and letting gallons of blood flow from his great veins. Finally only one line besides the leader for the harpoon was out and I had already begun to work the camera whenever the whale rose to blow. The wind had nearly died but had left a tremendous swell, and the little ship was rolling and tossing like a thing possessed. Captain Olsen, against his better judgment, was drawing the whale in for a second shot when the line slacked away as the ship dropped into the hollow of a great swell, then tightened suddenly and parted with a crack like a pistol shot when she rose on the crest.