him. Had I stayed, I should have cried, 'For the love of God, don't shoot!'

It may be that the recent revival-one might call it the resurrection-of 'Moby Dick' gave a lead and an encouragement to those writers who since that event have been adding to our knowledge of the whale and the whaling industry. Certainly, after a survey of their books, one feels safe in saying that more has been written exclusively on the subject in the last seven years than during the seventy preceding them. Further, at least two whaling stories have been elaborately and expensively 'screened,' the first of which had merits, while the other was a sorry travesty of Herman Melville's masterpiece, its 'White Whale' obviously a 'fake' and about as impressive as a rubber toy in a child's bath; altogether one of those pictures which cause a person who, like myself, is friendly to the Kinema, to wish very heartily that it would leave great Literature alone. Still, those pictures do at least serve to strengthen the idea suggested by the books, that the Whale, as the most wondrous and mysterious of created things, is at last, in the popular sense, coming into his own; and, perhaps, one of these days some one will produce a picture sufficiently true, and therefore sufficiently thrilling, to render any 'strong love interest' superfluous.

Nearly thirty years ago, home from my first whaling trip with the Norwegians, having seen for the first time the whale at close quarters, I was naturally eager to read what had recently been written, particularly out of actual experience, about the great mammal, its hunting and its hunters. The only modern and helpful books I could find were Bullen's Cruise of the Cachalot,' H. J. Bull's Cruise of the Antarctic,' Burn Murdoch's 'Edinburgh to the Antarctic,' and Prof. F. E. Beddard's 'Book of Whales,'* then just published. It was years later that I discovered the wonders of 'Moby Dick,' which I had heard of, but in my ignorance had assumed to be a book for boys. 'The Cruise of the Cachalot,' as being the work of a whaleman, held the strongest interest for me, though it told me nothing of the kind

* 'A Book of Whales.' By F. E. Beddard, F.R.S. Murray, 1900.

of whales whose acquaintance I had lately been making. On the other hand, the work of Prof. Beddard (who died last year), while primarily a handbook for students of zoology, told me very many things I wanted to learn; my one complaint being that the author had been too cautious as to the maximum length of the Blue Whale, largest of living things; for he would not admit the possibility of more than 80 feet, whereas, on a flensing stage in North Iceland I had, a few weeks earlier, taken a measurement-between perpendiculars, if you please— of 86 feet, and had heard tell of another of no less than 106 feet. The hearsay was, I confess, a little too much even for my young enthusiasm; yet, twenty-five years later, I was to receive the trustworthy account of a Blue Whale killed in the Antarctic, which measured 110 feet. I should like to think that the Professor's book is still in demand. If we are going to have a Literature of Whales-and a fairly long shelf might already be filled -the book, which is not a heavy one, in either sense of the word, ought assuredly to have a place, since it will save the new student, zoological or otherwise, much bewilderment over the different kinds of whales and their diverse ways.

For there are whales and whales, even among the giants concerning which all the books I have read have been written; the lesser sorts, from the Porpoise of 3 feet to the Grampus of 30 feet, including the White Whale of the Arctic, purveyor of bootlaces, and the Bottlenose, have thus far been all but ignored. It is, as a rule, the human interest that sustains, if it does not originally inspire, the writers. Wars apart, whaling has been for ages man's biggest adventure on the sea. So it is still, though in these days few harpoons are darted," save from the guns in the bows of sturdy little steamers. The risks, or nearly all of them, belong to the past, yet no one who has clung spray-battered to the ratlines while the whaler plunges and lurches towards that almost submerged, slow-gliding, animate mass of eighty tons, and the gunner crouches, finger on trigger, behind his weapon with its dreadful bolt, will ever question that the adventure survives. And there is always the off-chance that one, or other, of man's many inventions may fail, or trick, him at the moment of

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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 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, if 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 no 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.

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