OPINION OF AN ELOQUENT IRtsimMan. 387 
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 make 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 
surrounded 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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