CHAPTER XIX 



BIG GAME WITH A REVOLVER 



IT is not essential that one should be a whaler 

 to go a-whaling. I have never cared to 

 emulate the escapades of the old-time whalers 

 who sent their boats after the biggest living 

 animals and took them in a hand-to-hand battle, 

 and were often tossed into the air for their 

 pains. It is exciting enough to read about their 

 exploits in the very highest field of desperate 

 chance. 



My own exploits with whales as a layman are 

 very tame, yet once when Mr. Hancock Banning 

 undertook to aid me in photographing a seventy- 

 foot sulphur-bottom by sending his launch al- 

 most over the tail of the whale I thought it 

 sufficiently exciting, and I could imagine the 

 sensation of a man who has rowed twenty feet 

 farther than my position trying to harpoon or 

 lance a whale. 



Armed with a camera I was stationed in the 

 bow of the launch Torqua, and Mr. Banning man- 

 aged to get me fairly upon the whale, so near, 

 in fact, that he refused to come up. We had 



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