WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 23 



describes sighting a firmer whilst they were hunting the 

 more pacific sperm or cachalot. Bullen asks his mentor, 

 a coloured harpooneer, why he doesn't harpoon it, when 

 Goliath the harpooneer turns to him with a pitying look, 

 as he replies : 



" Sonny, ef yeu wuz to go and stick iron into dat ar fish 

 yew'd fink de hole bottom fell eout kerblunk. Wen I wiz 

 young'n foolish, a finback ranged 'longside me one day off 

 de Seychelles. I just gone miss'a spam whale, and I was 

 kiender mad muss ha' bin. Wall, I let him hab it blam 

 'tween de ribs. If I lib ten tousan year, ain't gwine ter fergit 

 dat ar wan't no time ter spit, tell ye ; eberybody hang ober 

 de side ob de boat. Wuz-poof ! de line all gone, Clar to glory, 

 I neber see it go. Ef it hab ketch anywhar, nobody ever see 

 us too. Fus, I fought I jump ober de side neber face de 

 skipper any mo'." 



I have described our similar experience elsewhere Weddel 

 sea in the Antarctic with the old-style whaling tackle and 

 a hundred to one hundred and ten foot blue whale or finner. 

 It took out three miles of lines from our small boats the 

 lines were got hold of from board ship, and the whale towed 

 the procession for thirty hours under and over ice, on to rocks ; 

 then the harpoons drew, and it went off " with half Jock 

 Todd's smithy shop in its tail " our sailor's parlance for its 

 going off with most of our shoulder gun explosive bombs in 

 its lower lumbar regions. These big fellows were so numerous 

 in the ice off Graham's Land that we sometimes thought it 

 advisable to keep them off our small boats with rifle bullets. 



Now we can kill these big fellows. Captain Svend Foyn, 

 a Norwegian, mastered them by developing a new harpoon. 

 Svend Foyn and the engineer Verkseier H. Henriksen in 

 Tonsberg worked it out together. A big harpoon fired from 

 a cannon, a heavy cable and a small steamer combined 

 made the finner whales man's prey. Captain Foyn had 

 made a considerable fortune at Arctic seal-hunting, and 

 thereafter spent five years of hard and unsuccessful labour 

 before he perfected his new method in 1868. Eighteen years 

 later there were thirty-four of such steamers engaged in the 

 industry in the North Atlantic, to-day there are sixty-four 



