OCEAN FISH AND OCEAN FISHING 45 



courting perhaps, and in the clear light we could 

 sec them splendidly. They gambolled like 

 kittens, rolling over and over in pure enjoyment 

 of existence, and spouting vigorously. Suddenly 

 they disappeared, and as suddenly reappeared, 

 always within a few hundred yards of our ship, 

 whose hull they may have mistaken for some very 

 big relation of theirs. This went on far half an 

 hour, and had our craft been a whaler, she might 

 have been filled up with oil and spermaceti. 



Curiously enough, a clay or two after this, we 

 fell in with one of the old-fashioned type of 

 whalers " hove to," " trying out " the blubber of a 

 large sperm, the smoke from her furnaces nearly 

 hiding the masts from view. 



In '^Animals I Have Known" (chap, xiv.) I 

 describe my adventures with a picnic-party of 

 jolly skippers at the Ballista group, near the 

 Chincha. Islands. We then had the following 

 experience with whales as we were sailing merrily 

 home in the evening, the whale-boat dancing 

 before the steady trade-wind, breasting the waves 

 like a cork. When half-way across, a sperm 

 whale rose ahead of us, and, waiting, as it were, 

 until we got abreast of it, acted as a kind of escort. 

 We could have touched it with an oar, and only 

 then realised (familiar though we were with whales 



