In the instance where three years intervened between the flinging
of the two harpoons; and I think it may have been something more
than that; the man who darted them happening, in the interval,
to go in a trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there,
joined a discovery party, and penetrated far into the interior,
where he travelled for a period of nearly two years, often endangered
by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the other
common perils incident to wandering in the heart of unknown regions.
Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have been on its travels;
no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing with its
flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose. This man and
this whale again came together, and the one vanquished the other.
I say I, myself, have known three instances similar to this;
that is in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second
attack, saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them,
afterwards taken from the dead fish. In the three-year instance,
it so fell out that I was in the boat both times, first and last,
and the last time distinctly recognized a peculiar sort of huge mole
under the whale's eye, which I had observed there three years previous.
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