moments, and the whale, in seeing rage, or blind wrath, take his revenge. True, the thrills of the modern whalemen must be warm ones compared with those of the da Basques of a thousand years ago, as they put out in their frail shalloups' to jab flimsy harpoons-' harpoon' is a Basque word-at a fifty-foot Nordkaper (Balana Biscayensis); or those of the first American hunters in the Pacific when a Cachalot took their boat between its jaws; or, coldest of all, those of the 16th-century British, or Dutch, adventurers in the Arctic when the Black Whale's flukes smashed them into the depths, or lashed them skywards. Even so, the adventure remains, and the oldest, hardest-bitten Norwegian gunner will allow, diif grudgingly, that it exists.

And the romance? Has not the romance departed? Nay, there is as much romance in whaling to-day as ever there was; and that is none. If we scent romance in a whaling book, it is of the author. Myself I have been guilty, inexcusably so, for I have seen and learned enough about whaling to know, at least, that it has never been anything but a hard, more or less brutal, filthy, strictly commercial business. What sort of life was it in Herman Melville's time, and long before and after, when the cruise might last as much as four years? Imagine the abominable grub, the inferno of the fo'cs'le, the ship saturated with the stench of boiling and boiled blubber, the sudden spells of frantic labour-hunting the whale and then dealing with the carcase-and worst of all, to any poor devil afflicted with brains, the deathly dullness of the weeks and months wherein was adventure at all! Presently we shall consider a different sort of whaling, that in the Arctic, but there also we shall look in vain, I fear, for Romance. Beauty we shall find in the North, as in the South-beauty of Nature, which mattered next to nothing to the men who, mostly, cursed Nature round the clock; beauty of Humanity -courage, endurance, rough kindliness, and, maybe, infinite tenderness-which lifted the business of whaling out of utter sordidness.

no

As for the modern method of whaling, with all its practical advantages, only a sentimentalist with an unemotional stomach, like myself, would find anything in it, apart from the adventure and knowledge, besides

discomfort and commerce. The little steamers which make their short cruises-three to ten days-from the land station, or floating factory, are seldom on even keel, seldom have dry decks, and their behaviour is often of the most violent sort. Neither in quality nor appearance is the food designed to tempt a jaded appetite, and 'accommodation' is too big a word to apply to the space in which one sleeps, or dozes, perhaps eats, and, if able, essays a little exercise. One forgets the devil of the old phrase, being constantly reminded that one is merely between the deep sea and the oil market; for every whale killed, and before he is killed, is discussed, not with regard to his mightiness or fighting qualities, but simply and solely as a yielder of so many barrels, meaning so many pounds, or dollars, or kroner.

Yet when the trip, or series of trips, is over, the amateur wants to do it again, the next year—and again, the year after-not just to witness the actual killing, but to see the whale as no pen, or brush, or camera can ever show him. Yes; it is an adventure, and, after all, romance is mainly a matter of distance, imagination another word for invention, and honest men believe in their own inventions, from poems to perpetual motion. But, to be frank, that is where the ordinary writing man goes astray when he takes to following the whale. He 'sees a story' in it, and he makes a story out of it, which, while quite a good story in its way, is not a strictly true story of whaling. Give it to a whaleman to read, and unless he be over-shy, or dishonestly polite, he will presently say: 'But here, mister, you've left out a lot of things and shoved in a lot more. The whale didn't do this, and the gunner didn't do that. And the gunner didn't shake hands with the mate; he only told the blighter to shut up and go to blazes. And you've got that bit about the grenade all wrong. And I'm dashed if I can see how you're going to get anybody to pay you good money for that! No offence, mister, but it strikes me as a darn funny sort of yarn'-or words to the same effect. So much for the writing man, like myself!

* I find myself corrected on this point by Mr Keble Chatterton. The new whale-catchers, as the whalers are now called, are nearly 20 feet longer than some I have sailed in, and Mr Chatterton describes them as 'comfortably fitted up.'

Still, if we mistrust the writing man, who does his best to report the truth as he sees it, how else are we to learn all the things we want to know about whales and whaling? Not one whaleman in five hundred can, or will, give a coherent, circumstantial account of his own experiences; not one in a thousand would, if he could, be at the pains to write a book. The bare idea would be shocking to him. 'Book! Lord bless you, mister, there isn't any book to it!' Happily there are more than a thousand whalemen, active or retired, still in the world, and one of them has lately taken the necessary pains to write a book which, while not superseding the works of the whalemen-authors of the past, is a welcome and valuable supplement to them. Whereas Melville and Bullen dealt with the Sperm Whale, or Cachalot, in Southern seas, our new whaleman-author, Captain John A. Cook, of Provincetown, Massachusetts, is mainly concerned, as was Scoresby, with the great Right Whale, or, as the Scottish whalemen called him, the Black Whale, of the Arctic. In 'Pursuing the Whale' Captain Cook has made no attempt to design a 'story.' I can figure him settling himself, calm and deliberate, to the task of producing a plain, reliable account, or narrative,' of his years at sea, particularly of the years spent in high latitudes, and much of the book is composed of extracts from his journals of bygone voyages. None the less, when all is said, he has given us a story, an unusual story, of a man and his day's work; in fact, a memorable story.

In a brief introduction Mr Allan Forbes informs us that Captain Cook, who was born in 1857, all his ancestors, as far as can be traced, having been seafaring people, first went to sea, as a mackerel fisher, when he was eleven years old, and made his last whaling voyage forty-eight years later. Mr Forbes concludes: The whaling days are gone, to be sure, but the romance is left, and "Pursuing the Whale" will do much to keep that romance alive.' You will note that he uses the word I would bar; but, at the same time, he modestly confesses that all his own knowledge of whaling has come to him from books-he names Moby Dick,' 'The Gam,' 'The Miriam Coffin,' 'Cruise of the Cachalot,' 'Nimrod of the Sea'-and from the lounge-chair yarns

of his friend, Captain Cook. I cannot conceive of the Captain using the word, or even thinking it.

In 1878, Captain Cook began his whaling career as a boat-steerer, and ten years afterwards became master of a whaleship. Those early days were spent in hunting the Sperm Whale in different parts of the ocean, and here is an adventure of that period, an adventure characteristic of the Cachalots, though one not likely, we may assume, ever to lose much in the way of novelty for the hunters. They had harpooned the whale, had fired a bomb into his vitals, following it up with a deadly stab of the lance; but he was not quite done for. It had been a long chase and a long fight, night was at hand, and the ship had disappeared in the mist. Coming suddenly to the surface, the whale caught the boat between the terrible teeth and bony sockets of his lower and upper jaws, and bit it in two with no more trouble than we take to crack an egg. 'The aft end of the boat had four men hanging to it, while one man and myself were on the forward end. The man with me cried: "Look, Mr Cook! Here he comes!" I turned my head, and lo and behold, the whale, lashing the water into foam, spouting great masses of clotted blood, was coming for us, with jaws wide open. As he came up to us he rolled on his side, closed his jaws upon the stem and-died, not two feet away from where I was holding on.'

So, once, as abruptly and almost as dreadfully, though less perilously for the slayers, I saw a Fin-whale (Rorqual) give up the ghost. In the neighbourhood of the Greenland ice the Norwegian gunner had put a second harpoon into a seventy-footer, and now the creature was lying at the surface, all but motionless, some forty fathoms from the whaler, which was also at rest. Every one on board was satisfied that he was as good as finished. But in a twinkling he came to and, snorting blood, rushed at us-the Rorqual, compared with the other great whales, is slim and swift-like a torpedo. The gunner yelled at the steersman on the bridge, who had already flung words most urgent into the tube leading to the engine-room; but there was not time for the whaler to get under way, and we all expected her to be rammed, as another whaler, some years earlier, had been rammed and sunk by such a whale, his head

going crash into the engine-room. As he was almost on us, however, the Rorqual heaved himself half out of the sea, and came down with his head athwart our bows, flattening the rail, and fo'cs'le chimney, snapping the shrouds of the mast, and setting the ship a-shudder. Next moment he slid back into the sea, finished. In discussing it afterwards the gunner, who in his time had seen many strange things done by whales, though never so spectacular a performance by a Rorqual, expressed the conviction that the assault had been made blindly, that we had simply chanced to be in the way of the crazy charge. But he did not thus question the calculated intent to destroy so often attributed to the Cachalot, which is frequently a vicious fighter, even when unprovoked, and the only whale completely furnished by Nature with the means, as a whaleman has put it, for fighting at both ends.

Here it may be remarked, by way of a mild reply to those who regard the modern method of whaling as 'unsportsmanlike,' that the whales hunted to-day are chiefly Rorquals, and that the Rorquals, which include the Blue-whale, Fin-whale, and Humpback, were carefully avoided by the old-time whalemen, for the very good reason that they sink as soon as life has gone out. Moreover, the Rorquals are on the move all the time, rarely lingering at the surface, and constantly changing their direction. Their killing from a small boat would be therefore not only difficult and hazardous, but vain. The old-time whaleman will, of course, declare that, with their comparatively thin blankets of blubber and short 'bone,' they were not worth harpooning. Until the Norwegian, Svend Foyn, some sixty years ago, invented the handy, sea-going little whaler and its swivel gun capable of discharging a hundredweight harpoon, with bomb nose and heavy expanding barbs, carrying a stout hempen cable, those Rorquals had been increasing and multiplying since the beginning of their time; and while the other whales have lost sadly in numbers they, despite the diligence of the well-equipped hunters during recent years, are still abundant, particularly in the far South. A year or two ago the Antarctic catch yielded oil and by-products of a value of about 4,000,000l. Whales are, however, slow and not prolific breeders, and some