Retail Price $17.95
Size 5x8
Format: Trade paperback
Category: Biography, Historical
ISBN 1-933698-02-0
ISBN 13 978-1-933698-02-1

Original publication date: 1913
Walter Noble Burns: 1872 - 1932

A Year With A Whaler

Excerpt from chapter IV
Turtles and Porpoises

I saw my first whales one morning while working in the bows with the watch under Mr.  Lander's supervision.  A school of finbacks was out ahead moving in leisurely fashion toward the brig.  There were about twenty of them and the sea was dotted with their fountains.  "Blow!" breathed old man Landers with mild interest as though to himself.  "Blow!" boomed Captain Winchester in his big bass voice from the quarterdeck.  "Nothin' but finbacks, sir," shouted the boatsteerer from the mast-head.  "All right," sang back the captain.  "Let 'em blow." It was easy for these old whalers even at this distance to tell they were not sperm whales.  Their fountains rose straight into the air.  A sperm whale's spout slants up from the water diagonally.  The whales were soon all about the ship, seemingly unafraid, still traveling leisurely, their heads rising and falling rhythmically, and at each rise blowing up a fountain of mist fifteen feet high.  The fountains looked like water; some water surely was mixed with them; but I was told that the mist was the breath of the animals made visible by the colder air.  The breath came from the blow holes in a sibilant roar that resembled no sound I had ever heard.  If one can imagine a giant of fable snoring in his sleep, one may have an idea of the sound of the mighty exhalation.  The great lungs whose gentle breathing could shoot a jet of spray fifteen feet into the air must have had the power of enormous bellows.