The meaning of the device was this:—The entangled whale had no doubt descended deep in the water, as its ordinary mode of escaping from its natural enemies; but the attachment and restraint of the line it could not escape from. It was an instinct with it, therefore, as he conceived,—as in the case of some well-known quadrupeds, which may be driven but will not be led,—to resist the restraining force, and to struggle to distance the point from which the restraint proceeds. The untoward effect of this instinct, my Father supposed, might be diverted by rapidly slacking out a large extent of the entangling line, so that it might sink _below_ the place of the fish, and so _draw downward_; for the same instinct which had incited it so perseveringly to dive, might naturally be expected to urge it, under this change of circumstances, to an upward course.
The experiment on being tried proved, in different cases, successful. The whale, stimulated to a new course by a new direction being given to the restraining line, returned to the surface, where it was received by its waiting assailants, and, when deprived of its life, became a prompt and easy prize, instead of an uncertain, hard-earned object of pursuit!
3. Besides the cases just recited of aptness in natural science, another occasion is before my recollection in which, during his varied adventures in the whale-fishery, this characteristic of mind, with my Father, was strikingly developed. A large whale had been “struck” on the borders of a vast sheet of ice, denominated a “field,” which took refuge beneath the frozen surface, and, after suffering the deprivation of air for a period too considerable for its capabilities of endurance, died there.
After a long interval of patient waiting, on the part of the whalers, for the turning out of the expected capture (for the compactness of a firm field of ice generally obliges the whale to return to the outside for the purpose of respiration), they proceeded to haul on the line to try to facilitate their expectation. But when as much force had been applied as the line might safely bear, their efforts came to a stand. There was no reactive motion indicative of life in the whale, nor any progress towards its withdrawal, if dead.