As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance
their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads;
even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound;
and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.*
*That part of the sea known among whalemen as the "Brazil Banks"
does not bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do,
because of there being shallows and soundings there, but because
of this remarkable meadow-like appearance, caused by the vast
drifts of brit continually floating in those latitudes,
where the Right Whale is often chased.
But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at
all reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially
when they paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black
forms looked more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else.
And as in the great hunting countries of India, the stranger
at a distance will sometimes pass on the plains recumbent
elephants without knowing them to be such, taking them for bare,
blackened elevations of the soil; even so, often, with him, who for
the first time beholds this species of the leviathans of the sea.
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