"Whale" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... too true: it was the swordfish and the whale: it was a fight of hammer and anvil; one hit, the other made a noise. Cautious and cruel, the pirate hung on the poor hulking creature's quarters and raked her at point-blank distance. He made her pass a bitter time. And her captain! ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... round, and sprang back to the hall, whither the minister had, coming down upon her, bows on, like a sea-shouldering whale, in a manner ejected Mistress Croale, and where he was now talking to her with an air of confidential condescension, willing to wipe out any feeling of injury she might perhaps be inclined to cherish at not being made more welcome: to his consternation, Gibbie threw his arms round her neck, and ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... be as good as his bond," said P. Q. "Remember, Gallant, never to print what you have received in confidence. I fired more than one reporter because he broke his word, although in breaking it he gave us a whale ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... alarm clanged, and Cain quickly turned his attention to the control banks. He jacked out the auto control and took over manually. And within seconds the pursuit was hovering over the great whale-like back of the Thrayxite craft, and then was drawn slowly to it as its powerful magnetics reached out, ensnared it. Then Cain cut the pursuit's ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... comparison—that is to say, there is a large series of skulls of various mammals, birds, reptiles, and fishes, and, again, leg and arm bones, and their parts, arranged side by side; hence you may compare the fore-limb of the human subject with that of a monkey, a lion, a whale, a marsupial, a bird, a reptile, or a fish. [Footnote: Of course, all this may be seen in the Museum of the College of Surgeons, or at Oxford or Cambridge, etc, but these are special institutions, and I am merely taking provincial ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... the ships," too, says the Psalmist, in this 104th Psalm, "and there goeth that leviathan, whom Thou hast made to take his pastime therein." This leviathan is no doubt the whale—the largest of all living things—often a hundred feet long, and as thick as a house. And yet even of him, the monster of all monsters, does God's Word stand true, that He has put all things under man's feet, that all things are ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... you need do is surround that mess of huts down there, make a noise like an apple pie, and shoot everything that comes out to take a bite—that is, after the trestle's done. If you can handle a spade and crowbar, and live on dessicated sawdust and tinned whale, you can take the shooting job on instanter. There's a good two weeks' work for you afterwards. Only start on Koppy. Eh, how's ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... ridge of rocks which looked like the back of a whale, running out some distance into the sea, where the water was whiter and leaped higher than anywhere else; and soon her dainty feet picked a way over the jagged rocks. The boy was about to send a ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... mightily obliged to Walls, but I don't deserve it by any usage of him here, having seen him but twice, and once en passant. Mrs. Manley forsworn ombre! What! and no blazing star appear? no monsters born? no whale thrown up? have you not found out some evasion for her? She had no such regard to oaths in her younger days. I got the books for nothing, Madam Dingley; but the wine I got not; it was but a promise.—Yes, my head ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... he proceeded by sea due north from his own habitation, leaving the desert land all the way on the starboard or right-hand, and the wide sea on the larboard or left-hand of his course. After three days sail, he was as far north as the whale-hunters ever go[3]; and then proceeded in his course due north for other three days, when he found the land, instead of stretching due north, as hitherto[4], to trend from thence towards the east. Whether the sea there lies within the land, he knew not[5], as he only waited for a west wind, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... herself ready for tea, trying to hide three of the six grease-spots with her hands, Horace appeared with a little birch switch across his shoulder, strung with fish. The fish were few and small; but Horace was just as tired, he said, as if he had caught a whale. He did not say he was glad to see his young cousin; but joy ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... 1272, rests on six columns supported by lions, with an inscription: "Nicolaus de Montava marmorarius hoc opus fecit." Opposite it is the ambo (1272), in a simple style, with a representation of Jonah being swallowed by a whale. In the choir is the throne adorned by mosaics, and the Cappella di San Pantaleone contains the blood of the saint, together with some relics of the Abbot Benedict. The cloisters still exist, though, of course, ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... not the only death; it was not even the most trivial cause of a death. Giants are big fellows, but Death's a bigger, though he may come in a little shape. Morgante had succeeded in joining his master. He helped him to take Babylon; he killed a whale for him at sea that obstructed his passage; he played the part of a main-sail during a storm, holding out his arms and a great hide; but on coming to shore, a crab bit him in the heel; and behold the lot of the great giant—he died! He laughed, and thought it a very little thing, but ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... a steel spear flashed, a willowy pole trembled in the air, a quick movement, a roar of rushing waters, a shower of spray that drenched the craft, a sound of escaping steam or hissing rope, and a white whale had been struck by Captain ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... and if held by the United States would soon be settled by a hardy, enterprising, and intelligent portion of our population. The Bay of San Francisco and other harbors along the Californian coast would afford shelter for our Navy, for our numerous whale ships, and other merchant vessels employed in the Pacific Ocean, and would in a short period become the marts of an extensive and profitable commerce with China and other countries ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... be a good person to learn interesting things from, so I asked him if he would mind telling me something about the whale fishing in the old days. He was just settling himself to begin when the clock struck six, whereupon he laboured ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... my memory the exact shape of it when the tide was lowest, and could at any time have chalked out its profile without looking at it. It was lower at both ends, and rose with a sort of curve towards the middle, like a huge black whale lying along the surface, and the staff, rising from the highest point, looked like a harpoon that was sticking in ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... or explain by means of intelligible words. At first he took refuge in the depths of his contempt for women. Cupid gave him line. When he had come to vent his worst of them, the fair face now stamped on his brain beamed the more triumphantly: so the harpooned whale rose to the surface, and after a few convulsions, surrendered his huge length. My lord was in love with Richard's young wife. He gave proofs of it by burying himself beside her. To her, could she have seen it, he gave further proofs of a real devotion, in affecting, and in her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... time will you come and get on the whale to-morrow?" this extraordinary personage asked. I gazed at him in bewilderment. He spoke French perfectly, and ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... fun of his sister and treated heirlooms in general with scorn, calling Celia to look at a print of Jonah in knee breeches and shoe buckles, emerging front the mouth of the whale. Allan always saw the fun ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... United States the colonists soon learned that there was petroleum in what is now the State of New York; but New York was a long way from the Atlantic seaboard in those days, and they went on contentedly burning candles or sperm whale oil, or, a little later, a rather dangerous liquid which was known as "fluid." The Indians believed that the oil which appeared in the springs was a good medicine. They threw their blankets upon the water, and when these had ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan
... whale With a very long tail, Whose movements were frantic Across the Atlantic. w Monstrous ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... back to a sermon preached by a former minister. The subject of that sermon was Jonah and the whale. The Captain, having been on several whaling voyages in his younger days, had his own opinion ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... after she had drifted, with two anchors, from six fathoms to four, she was at length brought up, when only a mile from the land. On this occasion Mr Skinner was beaten from the anchor-stock, and very strangely recovered. Five men were drowned, one of whom was supposed to have been devoured by a whale, which was seen about the time when he disappeared.[381] After raging four or five hours, the storm subsided, and the sea became as calm as if there had been no wind. Yet a tempest continued aboard the Globe, occasioned, as was reported, by the unreasonable conduct ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... commonwealth man, the dreamer of equality, Harrington, raged at the subtile advocate for despotic power; but the glittering bubble of his fanciful "Oceana" only broke on the mighty sides of the Leviathan, wasting its rainbow tints: the mitred Bramhall, at "The Catching of Leviathan, or the Great Whale," flung his harpoon, demonstrating consequences from the principles of Hobbes, which he as eagerly denied. But our ambiguous philosopher had the hard fate to be attacked even by those who were labouring to the same end.[362] The literary wars of Hobbes were fierce and long; heroes he encountered, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... daylight we saw a sail to the southward. The next day we came up with her and found her to be the British Queen, Simon Paul, master, from London, bound to the Cape of Good Hope on the whale-fishery. She sailed from Falmouth the 5th of December, eighteen days before I left Spithead. By this ship I wrote to England. At sunset she was almost out of ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... left hand was as cunning as his right The sword moved so quickly in the air that there seemed to be three. Ye saw him, when he in all his martial array sprang forwards and backwards, higher than he himself was tall, and if he sprang into the sea he swam like a whale. Ye saw the two combatants: the one darted his javelin, the other caught it in the air, and cast it back again, so that it pierced through shield and man down into the earth. Ye saw warriors with sharp swords ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... me. The way grew so narrow that we had to walk one by one through lines of wall perforated with holes for dead bodies. Once in a while we would come to a small chapel, for miserable variety's sake, and be told to admire some very old, very wretched painting. Jonah and the whale were represented in a double-barreled miracle picture. Not only was the whale about to swallow Jonah, but he was only as large as a good-sized brook trout, while Jonah towered away above him like a Goliath. I found myself wondering if the guide had convulsions, and, if he should have ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... another of these islands. The canoe men were afraid they might follow us and overset the canoes. The report of a musket will in all cases frighten them away. They blow up the water exactly like a whale. As we were gliding along shore, one of the canoe men speared a fine turtle, of the same species as the one I formerly saw, and made a drawing of in Gambia. At sun set we rowed to the shore, landed on some flat rocks, and set about cooking ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... meet and host him, since he was renowned and loved as a painter while still alive. He comments on Martin Luther, Erasmus of Rotterdam and painting, and demonstrates his curious, inquiring nature. He also describes his visit to Zeeland to see a beached whale, which washed away before he got there; but during this visit, Drer may have caught the disease from which he may have died several years later. Like Rembrandt, he enjoyed collecting things, and ...
— Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - [This is our volunteer's translation of the title] • Albrecht Durer
... the savage hunter takes with joy, yet with fear and trembling, is the whale. After the slaughter of a whale the maritime Koryak of North-eastern Siberia hold a communal festival, the essential part of which "is based on the conception that the whale killed has come on a visit to the village; ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... heaps of porpoises and heaps of flying-fish; some birds; unhewn timber—a nasty lot of it—and big floats of sea-weed. We saw a whale being pounded to death by a killer; and in the afternoon as perfect an example of a brand-new coral island as was ever seen. It looked like a ring of white snow floating on the water, and inside the ring was a careened two-master—just the ribs and stumps left. There was ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads. The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... distinguish the outlines of the heavy rollers near at hand, and Courtenay believed that the ship, in her passage, encountered in the water several narrow bands of a bright red color. If this were so, he knew that the phenomenon was caused by the prawn-like Crustacea which sailors call "Whale-food," a sure sign of deep water close to land, and, further, an indication that the current was still flowing strongly, while the force of the sea must have been ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... that seems inconsistent with reason or experience. Now, which is the more reasonable, that Nephi built a boat after the pattern mentioned in the Mormon Bible, being directed by God how to build it, and then crossed the ocean to this continent, or that Jonah was in the whale's belly for three days and three nights, and then made a safe landing? Or would it sound any better if Nephi had said that when he and his company came to the great waters, the Lord had prepared whales, ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... all the altitudes, latitudes, and longitudes, from the forty-first degree of latitude to the fifty-first, in the direction of the North Pole, which are the confines of Canada, or the Great Bay, where more especially the Basques and Spaniards engage in the whale fishery. In certain places in the great river St. Lawrence, in latitude 45 deg., I have observed the declination of the magnetic needle, and found it as high as twenty-one degrees, which is the greatest ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... manner of boats and nets and hooks and fish-traps and torch-baskets for night-fishing. I saw pictures of every kind of fishing, and both models and pictures of men killing whales. One picture was terrible,—the death agony of a whale caught in a giant net, and the leaping of boats in a turmoil of red foam, and one naked man on the monstrous back—a single figure against the sky—striking with a great steel, and the fountain-gush of blood ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... problem lies in the question, Why does one of these simple cells become a cabbage, another a rat, another a whale, another a man? Within the limits of known observation during historic time, every organism yields seed or bears progeny after its own kind. Between all neighboring species there are impassable, discrete chasms. The direct ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... was once surrounded by the house), there is a large bone, which appears to be the rib of some species of whale, but according to the vulgar opinion, it is the rib of the Dun Cow (y Fuwch Frech), killed by ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... that two-pound roast is put before Westy. Not such a whale of a roast, it ain't. It's a one-rib affair, like an overgrown chop, and it reposes lonesome in the middle of a big silver platter. It's done, all right. Couldn't have been more so if it had been cooked in a blast-furnace. Even the bone was ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... up and the arch of close-set stones glimmered grey, the blackness would have been unbroken had it not been for the tunnel-lights. They went on and on in a sparkling line as far as our eyes could reach; and if the most famous whale in the world had had a spine made of diamonds, Jonah would have got much the same effect that we did as he wandered about in the dark trying to get ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... search her? Well, that's rich! Unless you've read her from my book. She would probably have scratched out your eyes. There's an Amazon locked up in that graceful body. I'd like to see her head against a bit of clear blue sky—a touch of Henner blues and reds. What a whale of a joke! Abduct a young woman, risk prison, and then afraid to lay hands on her! You poor old piker!" ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... organs? And yet, at the outset of his studies, he finds that no adaptive reason whatsoever can be given for one-half of the peculiarities of vegetable structure; he also discovers rudimentary teeth, which are never used, in the gums of the young calf and in those of the foetal whale; insects which never bite have rudimental jaws, and others which never fly have rudimental wings; naturally blind creatures have rudimental eyes; and the halt have rudimentary limbs. So, again, no animal or plant puts on its perfect ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley
... I. 321, comments, "These must have been skulls of the manati, a very large fish, like large calves, which has a skin with no scales like a whale and its head is like that ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... No human force could do that even with a spear of the sharpest steel. Was the sword-fish roused to anger when the ship came upon him sleeping in the water; or did he mistake it for a strange species of whale? ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... along the banks of the Jhelum with its wooded mountains on the right and its rocky precipices on the left, we met a number of pilgrims who had religious scruples against taking part in letting blood of any kind of bird or beast or whale.... They had evidently been to their Mecca.... Another thing we discovered that is not generally understood among the unelect.... On the way we came upon a Hindu squatting by the roadside with a pail of rich fresh milk.... ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... chaffinches and green canaries, a reward was formerly paid for the destruction of birds in St Michael's, and it is said that over 400,000 were destroyed in several successive years between 1875 and 1885. There are valuable fisheries of tunny, mullet and bonito. The porpoise, dolphin and whale are also common. Whale-fishing is a profitable industry, with its headquarters at Fayal, whence the sperm-oil is exported. Eels are found in the rivers. The only indigenous reptile is the lizard. Fresh-water molluscs are unknown, and near the coast the marine fauna is not rich; but terrestrial ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... mock fights and chases, and other simple forms which gladness takes in birds, as well as in her plainer plumage, and absence of ornament, she represents the species at some remote period. And as with song so with antics and all set performances aerial or terrestrial, from those of the whale and the elephant to those of ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... that persons are likely to be competent trainers of animals if they are born under the influence of the Whale or of the Centaur or the Lion or the Scorpion or when the Lesser Bear rises at dawn or in those watches of the night when the Great Bear, after swinging low in the northern sky, is again beginning to swing upwards, or at those hours of the day when, as it can be established ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... in various forms to Teutonic languages, cf. German Kalb, and Dutch kalf), the young of the family of Bovidae, and particularly of the domestic cow, also of the elephant, and of marine mammals, as the whale and seal. The word is applied to a small island close to a larger one, like a calf close to its mother's side, as in the "Calf of Man," and to a mass of ice detached from an iceberg. (2) (Of unknown origin, possibly connected with the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... cod-hook attached and a lump of fat pork on it; for Archie, in the fervour of hope coupled with piscatorial ignorance and a sanguine disposition, had strongly advised his brother to err, if err he must, on the safe side, and be prepared for anything, from a great lake-serpent to a fresh-water whale. ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the century, whales were so plentiful, especially along the New England coast, that whale, or sperm, oil was used for lighting purposes, and many of the old whale-oil lamps are still in existence. The light they gave was dim and smoky, but it was far better than no light at all. As the ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... Winslow and the Doctor, whose name was Whitworth, made the tour of the neighborhood, with an escort of fifty men, and found a great quantity of wheat still on the fields. On Tuesday Winslow "set out in a whale-boat with Dr. Whitworth and Adjutant Kennedy, to consult with Captain Murray in this critical conjuncture." They agreed that three in the afternoon of Friday should be the time of assembling; then between them they drew up a summons to the inhabitants, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... 'em then, if you're so set on it!" he howled at the collie, waving a windmill arm at the fugitives. "Only I'll whale your measly ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... facts relating to what are called abortive organs. These consist of organs which the same reasoning power that shows us how beautifully these organs in some cases are adapted to certain end, declares in other cases are absolutely useless. Thus teeth in Rhinoceros{165}, whale, narwhal,—bone on tibia, muscles which do not move,—little bone of wing of Apteryx,—bone representing extremities in some snake,—little wings within soldered cover of beetles,—men and bulls, mammae: filaments without anthers in plants, mere scales representing ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... with certainty of success in their dangerous enterprises, and came back loaded down with spoil. All that beautiful wealth was won from the deep, and for years as many ships came and went as there were dwellings to give them speed and welcome. But the glory and the gain of the whale-fishery are past. The noble prey, too persistently and mercilessly pursued, has retired northward, and hidden among the icebergs. Now, when a ship's crew win a cargo, they win it from the clutches of eternal frost. It seems certain that the fishery will dwindle, year after year, until, at ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... smell of the wrack, the smell of the sea, the good strong smell of sea coasts. I walked fast; I was no longer cold. I looked at the stranded wreck, which grew in size as I approached, and came now to resemble an enormous shipwrecked whale. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the wind decided to show us what it really could do. We were runnin' before the wind with a triple-reefed mainsail and not another stitch. "Why weren't we under bare poles," you asks? Because there was a sea chasin' after us with every wave looking like a whale out of water. We weren't lookin' to get pooped, any more than we had to. The mainmast went with ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... along the port side of the deck until I am near the foremast, and then I can see a small buoy that the sailors are hoisting in. Almost immediately the water, at the same spot becomes dark and I observe a black mass rising to the surface. Is it a big whale rising for air, and is the Ebba in danger of being shattered by a blow from the ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... steamer was heavily loaded, and had little apparent motion; bright days and bright nights succeeded each other. A flock of gulls followed the steamer far out to sea. For three days no object of interest was seen on the level ocean except the occasional spouting of a whale. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... feels very much the same in his little igloo of ice with a pot of whale-blubber at ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... large extent was a creature of royal support, and for good reason. The actors in this institution were not producers of life's necessaries. To the alii belonged the land and the sea and all the useful products thereof. Even the jetsam whale-tooth and wreckage scraps of iron that ocean cast up on the shore were claimed by the lord of the land. Everything was the king's. Thus it followed of necessity that the support of the hula must in the end rest ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... canoes, at length, ventured to come under the ship's side; and an old man came on board, who seemed to be a chief from the finery of his garment, and the superiority of his weapon, which was a Patoo-Patoo, made of bone, that, as he said, had belonged to a whale. He staid on board but a short time, and when he went away, he took with him our guests, very much to the satisfaction ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... at five, A.M.; the snow very deep in the woods. Fell on Whale River at ten, A.M. The face of the country presents scarcely any variety; from Erlandson's Lake to this river it is generally well wooded, but afterwards becomes extremely barren, nothing to be seen on both sides of the river ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... revelled in the sight of the wonders, the view of the Tree of Gold, and the champion thereof in the lists of the Hotel de Ville, and again, some days later, of the banquet, when the table decorations were mosaic gardens with silver trees, laden with enamelled fruit, and where, as an interlude, a whale sixty feet long made its entrance and emitted from its jaws a troop of Moorish youths and maidens, who danced a saraband to the sound of tambourines and cymbals! Such scenes were bliss to the deaf housewife, and would ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... readiness his supplies, which consisted of hardtack, jerked venison, fat pork—the only provisions they had which would not freeze—tea, two kettles, sulphur matches, ammunition, and a reindeer skin sleeping bag. The Eskimos possessed sleeping bags of their own. Blubber and white whale meat, frozen very hard, were ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... equally successful run. About six o'clock on the first evening a huge whale was seen approaching on the starboard bow, and as he sported in the waves, rolling and lashing them into foam, the onlookers began to fear that he might endanger the line. Their excitement became intense as the monster ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... the less mischievous attempt. But they cannot hold all the letters I should wish to see. And yet a woman's pockets are half as deep as she is high. Tied round the sweet levities, I presume, as ballast-bags, lest the wind, as they move with full sail, from whale-ribbed canvass, should blow ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... whale-birds** appeared. During the heavy weather, Mother Carey's chickens only were seen, but, as the wind abated, the majestic wandering albatross, the sooty albatross and the ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... of the sea which, from their size or strength, have been termed "monarchs of the ocean," are the saw-fish and the sword-fish, which are formidable enemies to the whale; but it is not merely on their fellow-inhabitants of the deep that these powerful fishes exercise their terrible strength. Some singular instances are related of their attacking even the ships that intrude upon their watery domain. An old ...
— Harper's Young People, February 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... sir," cackled Furneaux delightedly. "I'll wangle that in on a respected colleague of mine, who is a whale at deducing a proposition from given premises, but cannot induce a general fact from particular instances to save his life ... Now, stifle your romantic frenzy, Mr. Grant, and listen to me. If you were ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... "this North American timber never lasts long; the pump-wells are defective, and when we carry sail upon her, they don't affect the water in the lee-bilge, and she rolls it through her air-streaks like a whale. She'll damage the best cargo that ever floated, in that way. Take my word for it, skipper, she'll never go across the Banks; she'll roll to splinters as soon as she gets into them long seas; and if we get dismasted ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... later he was taking the stairs at Le Brux's two steps at a time. As he approached the atelier, he heard sighing groans. He threw open the door without knocking. Stretched on the couch was the giant frame, wallowing feebly like a harpooned whale at the ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... something beyond what he had given, a miracle for their special benefit. He declined to gratify them. Of that generation he said: "There shall no sign be given it, but the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." (Matt. xii. 39-41.) As Jonah was miraculously preserved for three days and nights and was brought forth, as by a resurrection, so was the Son of man to be brought forth from the ...
— The Testimony of the Bible Concerning the Assumptions of Destructive Criticism • S. E. Wishard
... of the whale.] Heere we sawe the hunting of the Whale, (a strange pastime) certaine Indians in a Canoa, or boate following a great Whale, and with a harping Iron, which they cast forth, piercing the whals body, which yron was fastned to a long rope made of the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... in the waves; fight of the sharks and the mother whale; a day in the mountains; death of Le ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... starts on deck in an instant, and inquires "Where away?" but, perhaps, the next moment every one aloft and on deck, can perceive an enormous whale lying about a quarter of a mile from the ship, on the surface of the sea, having just come up to breathe,—his large "hump" projecting three feet out of the water. At the end of every ten seconds, the spout is seen rushing from the fore part of his enormous head, followed ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... disease supposedly caused by the growth of the ambergris in its intestines, had insisted upon boarding the carcass. Driving away the clamorous and ravenous sea fowl, he had dug down with his blubber-spade into the vitals of the whale and recovered the gray, spongy, ill-smelling mass which was worth so great ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... soil, and are represented by descendants who live within sight of the primitive dwellings their forefathers reared. Offshoots were, however, thrown off in many directions. Some went down to Cape May, whither the whale-fishing attracted them; others were among the pioneers of the West, and founded colonies at various places in New York State and in Pennsylvania; others took their places among the Argonauts of '49 and sought the gold-fields of California. But still the parent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... out! They're goin' up there to whale Jim, an' you know it. If you don't stop 'em, I'll telephone f'r the sheriff, and have ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... having stolen Glooskap's Family, was by him pursued. How Glooskap for a Merry Jest cheated the Whale. Of the Song of the Clams, and how the Whale smoked ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... takes its name appeared to be abundant; but there was too much surf to permit our landing upon it, and we were not so much in want of fresh provisions as to induce our risking any damage to the boats: we found the bones of a whale which had been thrown up on the beach where ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... seasickness, and especially the ladies; but this finally passed away, the greatest sufferers being exempt from it during the last half of the voyage. The inevitable monotony of our daily life was somewhat oppressive, there being few events to vary it. Occasionally a whale was sighted, throwing up a small column of water, as it rose at intervals to the surface, and thus marking its course, leading the passengers to some discussion as to the nature of this monster ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... moon, I would be surprised, I would indeed! There was only one in our whole family who ever galloped about to any extent—Uncle Peter Gregg—and you really couldn't blame him. Bulls were perpetually running into him, and once he fell overboard and a whale chased him to shore. Isn't it funny? Strangest thing! But there, Diane, I wonder your poor dear grandfather doesn't turn straight over in his grave—I do indeed. Many and many a time your poor father tried him sorely—and Carl's mother too." Aunt ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... talent is born to you? How do you employ that? The crop of spiritual talent that is born to you, of human nobleness and intellect and heroic faculty, this is infinitely more important than your crops of cotton or corn, or wine or herrings or whale-oil, which the Newspapers record with such anxiety every season. This is not quite counted by seasons, therefore the Newspapers are silent: but by generations and centuries, I assure you it becomes amazingly sensible; and surpasses, as Heaven does Earth, all ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a thread-ball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains in the thrower's bag. Or rather it is a harpoon hurled at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of cord in the boat, and, if the harpoon is not good, or not well thrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersman in twain or to ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the whale hath great plenty of sperm, and after that he gendereth, superfluity thereof fleeteth above the water; and if it be gathered and dried it turneth to the substance of amber. And in age, for greatness of body, on his ridge powder and earth is gathered, and so digged together ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... extending, this time, into the great South Sea. There, promoted to be harpooner, Israel, whose eye and arm had been so improved by practice with his gun in the wilderness, now further intensified his aim, by darting the whale-lance; still, unwittingly, preparing himself ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... the leading powers of Europe immediately followed. We were influenced in this measure by the existing and prospective importance of the islands as a place of refuge and refreshment for our vessels engaged in the whale fishery, and by the consideration that they lie in the course of the great trade which must at no distant day be carried on between the western coast of North America ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Millard Fillmore • Millard Fillmore
... "a mile in five or six minutes," "a mile in three minutes," "turned short, head and tail moving in opposite directions, and not more than two or three yards apart," "twelve or fourteen miles an hour," "swifter than any whale," "rising and falling as he moved," "head moving from side to side," "a mile ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... know) on the lip of this same rare Madrepore; a little "cirrhipod," the cousin of those tiny barnacles which roughen every rock (a larger sort whereof I showed you on the Turritella), and of those larger ones also who burrow in the thick hide of the whale, and, borne about upon his mighty sides, throw out their tiny casting nets, as this Pyrgoma does, to catch every passing animalcule, and sweep them into the jaws concealed within its shell. And this creature, rooted to one spot through life and death, was ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... The beach plum and bayberry bushes on the dunes were spangled with beady drops. The pole on Cannon Hill, where the beacon was hoisted when the packet from Boston dropped anchor in the bay, was shiny and slippery. The new weathervane, a gilded whale, presented to the "Regular" church by Captain Zebedee Mayo, retired whaler, swam in a sea of cloud. The lichened eaves of the little "Come-Outer" chapel dripped at sedate intervals. The brick walk leading to the door ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... up early in the morning and ready for the bear hunt. Jim told us what route each should take. He said, "Now boys, be careful, for she is an old whale, and if you get in to a fight with her some one will get hurt, or there ...
— Chief of Scouts • W.F. Drannan
... whether the earth was made in two billion years or two minutes, so long as it was made and we are satisfied with it. We do not care whether Jonah swallowed the whale or the whale swallowed Jonah. None of these things worry us in the least. We do not pin our faith on such little matters as those, but we try to so live that when we pass on beyond the flood we may have a record to which we may point ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... while we lay off this island that we saw a whale attacked and killed by a thresher and a swordfish, which was ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis
... doubt that the dodo was one of those instances, well known to naturalists, of a species, or part of a species, remaining permanently in an undeveloped state. As the Greenland whale never acquires teeth, but remains a suckling all its life; as the proteus of the Carniolian caverns, and the axolotl of the Mexican lakes, never attain a higher form than that of the tadpole; so the dodo may be described as a permanent nestling covered with down, and possessing ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... resources. Iceland's economy has been diversifying into manufacturing and service industries in the last decade, and new developments in software production, biotechnology, and financial services are taking place. The tourism sector is also expanding, with the recent trends in ecotourism and whale watching. Growth had been remarkably steady in 1996-2001 at 3%-5%, but could not be sustained in 2002 in an environment of global recession. Growth resumed in 2003, and inflation dropped back from ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... buoyant in his oily mail, Gambols on seas of ice the unwieldy Whale; Wide-waving fins round floating islands urge His bulk gigantic through the troubled surge; 295 With hideous yawn the flying shoals He seeks, Or clasps with fringe of horn his massy cheeks; Lifts o'er the tossing wave his nostrils bare, And spouts pellucid columns into air; The silvery arches ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... here which will give you the career of the dead man, Captain Peter Carey. He was born in '45—fifty years of age. He was a most daring and successful seal and whale fisher. In 1883 he commanded the steam sealer SEA UNICORN, of Dundee. He had then had several successful voyages in succession, and in the following year, 1884, he retired. After that he travelled for some years, and finally he bought a small place ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cistern night and day, in order to catch any fish that may come through the pipes. The Companies' filtering system may not be worth much, but it ought to be able to keep out something under the size of a whale. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... I come back for, then, to go home where no one knoweth me? I'll die like an Englishman this day, or I'll know the reason why!" and turning, he sprang in over the bulwarks, as the huge ship rolled up more and more, like a dying whale, exposing all her long black bulk almost down to the keel, and one of her lower-deck guns, as if in defiance, exploded upright into the air, hurling the ball to the ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... the Chincha Islands, took in a cargo of guano for China, and shaped their course then eastward across the calm southern ocean, whose lonely monotony was only broken by the occasional appearance of one of the larger kind of sea-birds, or by the distant spouting of a whale. On board, however, the same peace was far from prevailing. That little nut-shell that crept like a dot across the limitless expanse of waters was a little floating hell, where every evil passion raged from morning until night; and it was only by secretly fomenting discord ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... whetstone, for polishing up that classical wit of his on, till he carries it into Parliament to astonish the country squires. He fancies himself a second Goethe, I hav'n't forgot his hitting at me, before a large supper party, with a certain epigram of that old turkeycock's about the whale having his unmentionable parasite—and the great man likewise. Whale, indeed! I bide my time, Alton, my boy—I bide my time; and then let your grand aristocrat look out! If he does not find the supposed whale-unmentionable a good stout holding harpoon, with a tough line to ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... brightness are called Variable Stars, or "variables." The first star whose variability attracted attention is that known as Omicron Ceti, namely, the star marked with the Greek letter [o] (Omicron) in the constellation of Cetus, or the Whale, a constellation situated not far from Taurus. This star, the variability of which was discovered by Fabricius in 1596, is also known as Mira, or the "Wonderful," on account of the extraordinary manner in which its light varies from time to ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... Sometimes these huge animals lay on their backs, and with their long pectoral fins beat the surface of the sea, which always caused a great noise, equal to the explosion of a swivel. This kind of play has doubtless given rise to the mariner's story of a fight between the thrasher and the whale, of which the former is said to leap out of the water in order to fall heavily on the latter. Here we had an opportunity of observing the same exercise many times repeated, and discovered that all the belly and under side of the fins and tail are ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... a waiting to be got through with till they sighted Sandy Hook and the Neversinks,—a waiting varied with peeps at Marseilles and Gibraltar and the sight of a whale or two and one distant iceberg. The weather was fair all the way, and the ocean smooth. Amy was never weary of lamenting her own stupidity in not having taken Maria Matilda out of confinement before ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... wide geographical range, and the fact of its occurrence on the Pacific coast of America, previously indicated by two sources, appears now to be fully established. T. Gill in 1865 described a large shark known in the Gulf of California by the name of "Tiburon ballenas" or whale-shark, as a distinct genus—Micristodus punctatus—which, in my opinion, is the same fish. And finally, Prof. W. Nation examined in 1878 a specimen captured at Callao. Of this specimen we possess in the British Museum a portion of the dental plate. The teeth differ in no respect from those of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... neighbourhood together by the ears; and this was the only diversion she took pleasure in. She never went abroad, but she brought home such a bundle of monstrous lies, as would have amazed any mortal, but such as know her: of a whale that had swallowed a fleet of ships; of the lions being let out of the Tower, to destroy the Protestant religion; of the Pope's being seen in a brandy-shop at Wapping; and a prodigious strong man that was going to shove down the cupola of St. Paul's; ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... Maris, suppositus, aut porpoises aut horse-mackerel, grex; 'very like a whale' (Shak.); M.D. et peculiariter ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... us," and he glanced at the lady's spreading proportions. Then he went on. "You really should persuade him to be tidier in his costume, Jane; his ancestral namesake could scarcely have looked more dishevelled after his sojourn with the whale. Well, it is a small failing; one can't have everything, and on the whole, with your wealth and the rest, you have been ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... the whole object move. He watched it closely. It did stir! It was some living thing, then. But what? A whale? ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... the signal flashed to the engine room. Instantly the full power of the motors was turned into the giant shafts and the propellors threshed the ocean with the fury of a wounded whale. With all the might she possessed the submarine strove to free herself and ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... then he saw indistinctly through the driving weather another airship wallowing along like a porpoise, and also working up. Presently the clouds swallowed her again for a time, and then she came back to sight as a dark and whale-like monster, amidst streaming weather. The air was full of flappings and pipings, of void, gusty shouts and noises; it buffeted him and confused him; ever and again his attention became rigid—a blind and deaf balancing ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... itself. It was something very big, judging from the commotion it made in the water; and at last he did see it or a part of it—a vast brown object which looked like a gigantic man's shoulder, but it might have been the back of a whale. It was no sooner seen than gone, but in a very short time after its appearance cries as of birds were heard at a great distance. The cries came from various directions, growing louder and louder, and before long Martin saw many ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... quarters!' and the watch officer pulls a few bells and talks through three or four tubes, and in no time the ship is coming around in a circle, and up on deck came piling about two hundred lusty young seamen, and it was, 'boats away,' and over the side went hanging gigs and cutters and whale-boats, and then it was, 'Search-lights all clear!' and in about one minute the big ship was back on the spot, and in another minute and a half there were eight boats with half-dressed crews rowing around, and six big search-lights playing tag on the waters. An hour and a half ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... animal was not oftener captured. A fishing establishment with a good boat, a trained crew, and proper appliances for extracting the oil, could not fail to return a large profit to the proprietors, and every now and then they could kill a whale, one or more of which could be frequently seen disporting themselves in ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... head, and the little incident was soon forgotten in the interest of the rest of our journey. For we sailed on now in bright sunshine, the uneasy motion of the schooner was at an end, and there was always something fresh to see. Now it was a whale, then a shoal of fish of some kind, and sea-birds floating here and there. Then some mountain peak came into view, with lovely valleys and vast forests of pines—scene after scene of beauty that kept us on deck till it was too dark to see anything, and tempted ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... unfortunately to quarrel with his Captain, which induced him to quit the service of the Company. In the course of his voyages to India, and in the Indian seas, he made what he thought an important discovery relative to the southern whale fishery: he communicated it to a mercantile house upon his return, and was employed by them in the speculation. He now, however, became unfortunate for the first time: his ship was wrecked off the island of Olaheite, and the crew and himself compelled to remain for two or three ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... a few feeble oil lamps were in use. Many miles of streets were dark and dangerous, and highway robberies were frequent. At length (1815) a company was formed to light the city with gas. After much opposition from those who were in the whale-oil interest the enterprise succeeded. The new light, as Miss Martineau said, did more to prevent crime than all the Government had accomplished since the days of Alfred. It changed, too, the whole aspect of the ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... took little Toussaint, of course; and they two viewed in wonderment the rolling, surging, thundering ocean; and the immense whale, one hundred and five feet long, that had been cast ashore. It is safe to assert that to the end of her days Sacagawea never forgot these ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... at the bowsprit, where we watched the clumsy gambols of the porpoise, racing and leaping and turning somersets in mid-air about the ship. Once, I mind the St. Pierre gave a tremor as if her keel had grated a reef; and a monster silver-stripe heaved up on our lee. 'Twas a finback whale, M. Radisson explained; and he protested against the impudence of scratching its back on our keel. As we sailed farther north many a school of rolling finbacks glistened silver in the sun or rose higher than our masthead, when one took the death-leap to escape its leagued foes—swordfish ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... adorn "his mysterious female companion." Here also he held a wonderful feast with another giant; and, ordinary fish not sufficing to satisfy their enormous appetites, the two embarked in a stone canoe, sailed out into the Great Lake of Uniras, as they called the Basin, and there speared a whale, which they brought to the shore and devoured at short notice. The approach of the white man causing the Indian giant to desert his old haunts, he sailed out on the great water and vanished from sight; but some day, when men and animals live together ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... there are two classes, the kind that lives in schools, like the mackerel, and the kind that lives by itself, like the whale. ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... women were made to wear "hoops," pictures of which I have seen in old publications. Imagine, if you can, a bird-cage three feet high and four feet across, formed of bone of the whale or some metal. This was worn beneath the dress, expanding it on either side so that it was difficult to approach a lady. A later order was given to wear a camel-like "hump" at the base of the vertebral ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... art, the harmony of the nymphs of the groves, the fountains, and the waves: yet the crowd of attendants who followed the court complained of their inconvenient lodgings, [109] and the nymphs were too often alarmed by the famous Porphyrio, a whale of ten cubits in breadth, and thirty in length, who was stranded at the mouth of the River Sangaris, after he had infested more than half a century the seas ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... ought to know how: stove in, crushed, sunk, lost in the snow, frozen, starved, sir. It's one big risk, I tell you. It's all very well for the walrus-hunters and whale-fishers, who go for their living; but you're a gentleman, with money to fit out that steamer as you have done it. There's no need for you to go; and if you'll take my advice, ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... great Greenland whale which is found in the Northern Ocean has a throat so small that it can not swallow anything larger than a herring. Its principal food consists of a small marine mollusk, about an inch and a half long. It catches its ...
— Harper's Young People, April 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... cut off; the line of descent seems complete to the horse of our day. Small beginnings seem to be the rule in all provinces of life. There is little doubt that the great animals of our day—the elephant, the whale, the lion,—all had their start in small forms. Many of these small forms have been found. But a complete series of any of the animal forms that eventuated in any of the dominant species is yet wanting. It is quite certain that the huge, the gigantic, the monstrous in animal, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... taste and capacity of the ignorant crowds by which they were followed. The king's mummers were arrived, together with many other marvels in the shape of puppet-shows and "motions" enacting the "old vice;" Jonas and the whale, Nineveh, the Creation, and a thousand unintelligible but equally gratifying and instructive devices; one of which, we are told, was "four giants, a unicorn, a camel, an ass, a dragon, a hobby-horse, and sixteen ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... inhalations and the cigarette was done. Again she took up the knitting, pausing for but one brief speech before the needles began their shrewd play. This concerned the whale. She said the whale was the noblest beast left to us in all the animal kingdom and would vanish like the buffalo if treated as food. She said it was shameful to reduce this majestic creature of the deep to the dimensions of a chafing dish and a three-cornered ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... hold me," said Oliver. "I've got hold of a whale, and it will tug me off the rock. Help, please, it's cutting into ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... England as a whaler, with all the boats, lances, harpoons, lines, and other apparatus used in the whale fishery. It was intended that she should do a little business in that way if Captain Harvey thought it advisable, but the discovery of new lands and seas was their chief end ...
— Fast in the Ice - Adventures in the Polar Regions • R.M. Ballantyne
... green slopes the white hare of the arctic gambolled, and tiny bears, soft and silken flossed, played at the entrances of moss-ensconced caves. Out on the sea unexpected herds of walrus lay sleeping on floating ice; harp seals sported joyously in the waves; a white whale spouted shafts of blue water high into the air. From the interior mountains came the howl of wolves and foxes, the sound of rushing waters and the roar of released glaciers. Nature ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... animals of the North and the huge mammals of the sea were slaughtered for their fat, and vegetable sources were cultivated. Later, sperm and colza were the most common oils used by the advanced races. The former is an animal oil obtained from the head cavities of the sperm-whale; the latter is a vegetable oil obtained from rape-seed. Mineral oil was introduced as an illuminant in 1853, and the modern ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... soldier's head. The first thing he did was to turn up in Italy—as suddenly as if he had poked his head through a window; and one look from him was enough. The Austrians were swallowed up at Marengo as gudgeons are swallowed by a whale. Then the French VICTORY sang a song of triumph that all the world could hear, and it was enough. "We won't play any more!" ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... very young will be followed by "much rain, snow, blow much." (9/13. Darwin 'Journal of Researches' 1845 page 215.) I may add, as showing forethought in the lowest barbarians, that the Fuegians when they find a stranded whale bury large portions in the sand, and during the often-recurrent famines travel from great distances for the remnants of the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... the every-day voice of the trenches—possibly the enemy were dismayed by the loss of the Triumph. He had seen it all, he said, from this very spot—a sight one was not likely to see more than once in a lifetime. The great ship had rolled over like a stricken whale. Her torpedo-nets were out, and as she turned over these nets closed down on the men struggling in the water, and swept them under. He, too, expressed entire confidence in the Turk's ability to stop any farther advance and, calling an aid, sent us to the periscope, which ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... chilly, glutinous, unpleasant to look upon, insipid in the mouth. It is a preparation which seems to mark a transition stage in culture; just as the South Sea Islanders, with the advance of civilisation, forsook putrid whale for roast missionary, the great English middle classes complained that tarts and plum-puddings were too substantial, more suited to the robust digestions of a past generation. In the blanc-mange, on the other hand, they found almost an appearance of distinction; ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... know that many of the permanent facts of the universe are NOT chance. It is not chance that the heavenly bodies swing clear of each other, that the seed is furnished with the apparatus which will drift it to a congenial soil, that the creature is adapted to its environment. Show me a whale with its great-coat of fat, and I want no further proof of design. But logically, as it seems to me, ALL must be design, or all must be chance. I do not see how one can slash a line right across the universe, and say that all to the right of that is chance, and all to the left ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... save in getting the second quality of foolscap for fivepence. However, I suppose it can't be helped, and after all, if the thing succeeds, one can look upon the penny in the light of an investment. It's throwing a sprat to catch a whale, as the proverb says: though I'm afraid Herr Max would say that that was a very immoral capitalist proverb. How horribly low we must be sinking, Edie, when we come to use the anti-social language ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... day he proceeded westwards along the southern part of Trinidad, until he arrived It the westernmost point, which he called "La punta de Arenal;" and now he beheld the gulf of Paria, which he called "La Balena" (the gulf of the whale). It was just after the rainy season, and the great rivers which flow into that gulf were causing its waters to rush with impetuosity out of the two openings [20] which lead into the open sea. The contest ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... famous press of Nuremberg. Then he added these mysterious words: "Alas! alas! small things come at the end of great things; a tooth triumphs over a mass. The Nile rat kills the crocodile, the swordfish kills the whale, the book will kill ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... eye fell. He was called Jonah by his employees; and he was called Jonah partly because his visits to the places of their industry invariably presaged disaster, but principally for the gross-minded and wrongly-adduced reason that he had (in their opinion) a whale's belly. ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... stay here a week," he declared, with jocular savagery. "Took half my leader and my pet fly—I got him with a peacock-bodied gray hackle that I revised to suit my own notions—and, by the great immortal Jehosaphat, he looked like a whale when he jumped up clear of the riffle, turned over, and—" His flabby, white hand made a soaring movement to indicate the manner in which the four-pounder ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... turnips in the north of Scotland, twenty acres of yellow and ten of globe turnips. Deacon Williamson's six and eight year old Aberdeen work oxen—these were not the days of quick returns in cattle—consumed them, and they went to the Greenland whale-ships at last. Mr Innes was the poor man's friend, and a kind master to his servants, but a cool determined man. Although standing almost six feet three inches in height, he was a splendid horseman; ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... admitted, we should have a case of convergence at least in external characters, for the anthropomorphous apes are certainly more like each other in many points, than they are to other apes. All analogical resemblances, as of a whale to a fish, may indeed be said to be cases of convergence; but this term has never been applied to superficial and adaptive resemblances. It would, however, be extremely rash to attribute to convergence close similarity of character in many points of structure ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... As the object pictured itself to his responsive imagination, he expressed it with what was to him a direct realism. His lines are filled with a profusion of metaphors of every degree of effectiveness. To him the sea was "the water-street," "the swan-path," "the strife of the waves," "the whale-path"; the ship was "the foamy-necked floater," "the wave-farer," "the sea-wood," "the sea-horse"; the arrow was "the battle adder"; the battle was "spear-play," "sword-play"; the prince was "the ring-giver," "the gold-friend"; the throne was "the gift-stool"; ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... jest t' see her. I took special care o' my get-up, knowing how much Mary sot by such things. I thought I was all right till I reached the town; then it broke on me like a clap o' thunder that I was about as out o' place there as a whale in a fresh-water lake. Mary was real upset 'bout my comin' onexpected an' lookin' so different to city folks, an' she out an' out told me 't warn't no use, she was bein' courted by a city man as was rich, an' goin' t' make ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... waiter-girls, and other metropolitan refinements, were unknown among them. No savage in good standing would take postage-stamps. You couldn't have bo't a coonskin with a barrel of 'em. The female Aboorygine never died of consumption, because she didn't tie her waist up in whale-bone things; but in loose and flowin' garments she bounded, with naked feet, over hills and plains, like the wild and frisky antelope. It was a onlucky moment for us when CHRIS. sot his foot onto these 'ere shores. It would have ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 2 • Charles Farrar Browne
... cried O'Mooney: "he lends himself, like the whale, to be tickled even by the fellow with the harpoon, till he finds what he is about, and then he pays away, and pitches the fellow, boat and all, to the devil. Ah, countryman! you would give me credit indeed for my good humour if you knew what danger you have put me in by detecting ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... cigar-shaped object floated on the surface of the water, silent, motionless. The brilliancy which issued from it escaped from its sides as from two kilns heated to a white heat. This apparatus, similar in shape to an enormous whale, was about 250 feet long, and rose about ten or twelve ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... youth. And to the man who loves historical things, the cane presented to General Stark when he was a major, for valiant conduct in defence of Fort William Henry, will be of especial interest. This cane is made from the bone of a whale and is headed with ivory. On the mantelpiece stands another very interesting souvenir, a bronze statuette of Napoleon I., which Lafayette brought with him from France and ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... if Saint Nicholas don't come tonight, you can see the great, big whale tomorrow. If he's a good whale he'll surely let the leedle Dutch twins see ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... earth, seats being made around them. On the Murrumbidgee and Murray the graves are covered with well thatched huts containing dried grass for bedding and enclosed by a parterre of a particular shape, like the inside of a whale-boat.**** On the Darling, as above stated, the graves are in mounds* covered with dead branches and limbs of trees, and are surrounded by a ditch, which here we found encircled by a fence of dead ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... instant. "I guess we'd better not take a chance," he replied at length. "Such a whale of a lot depends on his not knowing that I'm alive and kicking; I'd hate like the devil to spoil everything now by his getting a glimpse of me. Besides, for all we know they may be coming through here to meet somebody—the rest of ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames |
