120 THE SAVAGE WORLD. 
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plunged into her, but she seemed indifferent to pain and solicitous only for the 
safety of her cub. In this case the fishermen suffered no injury and were 
exposed to no danger. But quite frequently the enraged mother destroys the 
boats and causes the loss of human life in her frantic attempts to rescue her 
offspring. On one occasion in particular, after the mother discovered that her 
cub could not follow her, and that its blood which dyed the water was being 
shed by the enemy in the boats, she plunged many fathoms below the sur¬ 
face, swam some distance until she had acquired great momentum, and rising 
beneath one of the boats smashed it as though it had been a cockle-shell. 
The crew were thrown into the water, and several of them, having become 
entangled, were borne to a watery grave. It not seldom happens, in spite of the 
military order which prevails amongst the crew of a whaling boat, and the 
A WOUNDED WHALE STRIKING ITS PURSUERS- 
long and varied experience of the men, that several boats will be destroyed 
before the frantic mother exhausts her strength and yields her life to the hunter. 
To be dragged by the whale many miles away from the ship, and then when 
thus deprived of assistance to find their boat smashed and themselves in the 
midst of the sea, surrounded it may be by drowning companions, has been an 
experience that many a whaler has undergone more than once. Such is the 
change which maternal solicitude or the frenzy of intolerable pain can work in a 
creature which, itself inoffensive, finds no enemy but man, except sword-fishes, 
thresher sharks, and possibly narwhals! 
It has been truly said that “ what is one man’s meat is another man’s 
poison,” and while to our untrained or uncultivated palates the flesh of the 
whale would be as revolting as the bane of sick children, cod-liver oil, yet 
there are people who would reject with disdain what we consider delicacies and 
