OPINION OF AN ELOQUENT IRISHMAN. 337 



her young, as if to bid it persist and escape the wicked whal- 

 ers. But the firmly-fixed harpoon held the young whale to 

 the tether, and after several runs it rose to the surface in or- 

 der to mak'e its last fight, to which all previous efforts seemed 

 tame. It lashed the waves with a noise like thunder, and 

 the spray caused by it and by the leaps and writhings of the 

 agonized mother was carried more than a mile, causing a 

 blinding mist for many rods around. Finally, all efforts fail- 

 ing, the young whale gave the final shudder and was dead, 

 lying lifeless on the surface. Then went up the shouts of the 

 boatmen, in which we joined ; but a hauser, lashed to the 

 tail of the dead whale, enabled the crews to float it slowly 

 toward the whale-ship, which had drawn near. But the moth- 

 er whale continued to lash the waters, as with snorting and 

 blowing she evinced signs of fury until long after the blub- 

 ber-spades had dissected much of the body, and a sea of blood 

 Hurrounded the ship. 



I will conclude this chapter with the eloquent peroration 

 of the gifted Burke, made in the House of Commons in 1774 : 

 " As to the wealth which the colonists have drawn from the 

 sea by their fisheries, you had that matter fully opened at 

 your bar. You surely thought these acquisitions of value, 

 for they seemed to excite your envy ; and yet the spirit by 

 which that enterprising employment has been exercised ought 

 rather, in my opinion, to have raised esteem and admiration. 

 And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it ? Pass by the 

 other parts, and look at the manner in which the New En- 

 gland people carry on the whale fishery. While we follow 

 them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them 

 penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay 

 and Davis's Straits ; while we are looking for them beneath 

 the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the op- 

 posite region of polar cold that they are at the antipodes, 

 and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south. Falk- 

 land Island, which seemed too remote and too romantic an 

 object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and 



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