His CAPTORS. 207 



Appalling Forms of Danger to be encountered by Whalemen. 



dictionaries as a thousand words that are spok- 

 en oftener in ears polite. I like to talk with 

 old whalemen upon the hair-breadth escapes 

 and perilous adventures of their hazardous war- 

 fare upon the monsters of the deep. It is a 

 marvel that death, in its most appalling forms, 

 is not oftener met with. Whalers, I think, 

 have to look danger more full and steadily in 

 the face than any other class of men except 

 soldiers. 



Danger, whose limbs of giant mold, 

 What mortal eye can fix'd behold ? 



Besides the multifarious ordinary perils of 

 the sea, there is that incurred in lowering boats 

 so often ; then the risk of being run under and 

 swamped in the lightning-like speed and evolu- 

 tions of a seventy-foot whale immediately upon 

 being struck ; then the danger from a whale's 

 flukes and fins, as the monster slues and slats 

 them round, and makes the deep boil like a 

 pot, to the slightest tap of which a whale-boat 

 is hardly more than a bubble. Sometimes the 

 mammoth brute comes up from the depths 

 right under the boat, and takes it, with all on 

 board, transversely into his huge mouth, that 

 can be opened sixteen and twenty feet. To be 



