As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colors
from his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled,
and hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside
must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has
died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse.
It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale;
worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent
to bury the departed. So intolerable indeed is it regarded by some,
that no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it.
Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact
that the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality,
and by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose.
Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw
that the Frenchman had a second whale alongside; and this
second whale seemed even more of a nosegay than the first.
In truth, it turned out to be one of those problematical whales
that seem to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious dyspepsia,
or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely
bankrupt of anything like oil.
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