THE GREAT GAME OF THE SEA.*

• The Cruise of the Cachalot' Bound the World After Sperm Whales. By F. T. Mallen, First Mate. With Illustrations. London : Smith and E'der. [8e. 6:1„1

THE beat way to make our readers understand the nature of this exciting and attractive book is to quote the words of generous praise addressed by Mr. Rudyard Kipling to its author,—words which he has very naturally and very properly placed at the beginning of his volume :-

"I've never read anything that equals it in its deep-sea wonder and mystery ; nor do I think that any book before has so com- pletely covered the whole business of whale-fishing, and at the same time given such real and new sea pictures. You have thrown away material enough to make five books, and I con- gratulate you most heartily. It's a new world that you've opened the door to."

That is a really wonderful piece of criticism, for it conveys in fifty words or so "the extreme characteristic impression" of Mr. Bullen's book. A " deep-sea wonder and mystery" per- vades every page, and this without any straining or self- conscious art. Mr. Bullen has not set himself down to

enchant us or to draw wonderful and soul-shaking pictures of the ocean. He has merely told the tale of his long voyage after sperm whales as it happened. That this narrative

produces so great and so delightful an impression on the

reader is due to three facts. First, the hunting of the sperm whale, the greatest of living creatures, is necessarily one of the most exciting things in human experience. Not only do the great game of the sea fight with splendid courage and often with deadly effect, but the fact that they can only be found and encountered in the loneliest wastes of ocean gives a romance to the struggle which hardly belongs to any other form of hunting. The hunter of tigers and elephants runs great risks, but he does not actually do battle with his foe. He fires, and if he does not kill he is often killed, but there

is little room for actual combat. When a boat or maybe a couple of boats are attacking a sperm whale, it is a verit-

able sea-fight, in which the strength and ferocity of the whale are matched against man's courage and intelligence.

We are too apt to think of the " sea-shouldering " whale as clumsy, foolish, and timid. In reality, the sperm whale is one of the most terrible and most ferocious of creatures.

To attack the sperm whale requires the highest courage, and it is not without a certain fitness that among the armour

and trophies of arms at the Tower should stand a set of harpoons and whale-guns, as if in mute witness that the men who use them need the heart of the soldier and rank with him in valour. The next cause of attraction in Mr.

Bullen's book is the fact that it deals with the sea and sea-life. This, as long as England is England, must con-

stitute a claim upon the attention of our race. We are the lords of the sea, and nothing which is of the sea can

fail to interest us. Lastly, as Mr. Kipling says, Mr. Millen opens the door into a new world. Yet all these reasons for attractiveness in the book would have been of no avail had not Mr. Bullen possessed that happy faculty which enables a man to convey to his fellows by the written word what he has seen, and to call up before them the scenes in which he took part. Mr. Bullen has insight and he has the power of presentation,—the power of making things vivid and inter. eating. In a word, he has seen things worthy the telling, and he tells them worthily.

We would like, if space allowed, to quote as examples of Mr. Bullen's style, first, one of the many passages describing

life in an American whaler, and the men and manner of these strange ships ; next, a description of one of the sea- fights with a whale ; and, lastly, one of the accounts of some incident in the mighty pageant of winds and waves that was ever stretching before his eyes. But to do all this adequately would be impossible. We shall, therefore, only make one quotation, leaving our readers to find for themselves the thousand and one good things of the text. Here is a fight with a whale, in which the whale did terrible execution among his assailants :-

" We sped along at a good rate towards our prospective victim, who was, in his leisurely enjoyment'of life, calmly lolling on the surface, occasionally lifting his enormous tail out of water and letting it fall flat upon the surface with a boom audible for miles. We were, as usual, first boat ; but, much to the mate's annoy- ance, when we were a short half-mile from the whale, our main- sheet parted. It became immediately necessary to roll the sail up, lest its flapping should alarm the watchful monster, and this delayed us sufficiently to allow the other boats to shoot ahead of us. Thus the second mate got fast some seconds before we arrived on the scene, seeing which we furled sail, unshipped the mast, and went in on him with the oars only. At first the pm ceedings were quite of the usual character, our chief wielding Ili; lance in most brilliant fashion, while not being fast to the animal allowed us much greater freedom in our evolutions ; but that fatal habit of the mate's—of allowing his boat to take care of herself so long as be was getting in some good home-thrusts once more asserted itself. Although the whale was exceedingly vigorous, churning the sea into yeasty foam over an enorm% area, there we wallowed close to him, right in the middle of the turmoil, actually courting disaster. He had just settled down for a moment, when, glancing over the gunwhale, I saw his tail, lib a vast shadow, sweeping away from us towards the second mate' who was laying off the other side of him. Before I had time think, the mighty mass of gristle leapt into the sunshine, curved back from us like a huge bow. Then with a roar it came at us, released from its tension of Heaven knows how many tons. Pull on the broadside it struck us, sending every soul but me flyia. out of the wreckage as if fired from catapults. I did not because my foot was jammed somehow in the well of the boat but the wrench nearly pulled my thigh-bone out of its socket. had hardly released my foot, when, towering above me, came the colossal head of the great creature, as he ploughed through the bundle of debris that had just been a boat. There was an appalling roar of water in my ears, and darkness that might be felt all around. Yet, in the midst of it all, one thought pre- dominated as clearly as I had been turning it over in my mind in the quiet of my bunk aboard= What if he should swallow me ?' Nor to this day can I understand how I escaped the portals of his gullet, which of course gaped wide as a church door. But the agony of holding my breath soon overpowered every other feeling and thought, till just as something was going to snap inside my head I rose to the surface. I was surrounded by a welter of bloody froth, which made it impossible for me to see; but oh, the air was sweet ! I struck out blindly, instinctively, although I could feel so strong an eddy that voluntary progress was out of the question. My hand touched and clung to a rope, which immediately towed me in some direction—I neither knew nor cared whither. Soon the motion ceased, and, with a seaman's in. stinct, I began to haul myself along by the rope I grasped, although no definite idea was in my mind as to where it was attached. Pre. sently I came butt up against something solid, the feel of which gathered all my scattered wits into a compact knub of dread. It was the whale ! 'Any port in a storm,' 1 murmured, beginning to haul away again on my friendly line. By dint of hard work I pulled myself right up the sloping, slippary bank of blubber, until I reached the iron, which, as luck would have it, was planted in that side of the carcass now uppermost. Carcass I said—well, certainly I had no idea of there being any life remain. ing within the vast mass beneath me ; yet 1 had hardly time to take a couple of turns round myself with the rope (or whale-line, as I had proved it to be), when I felt the great animal quiver all over, and begin to forge ahead. I was now composed enough to remember that help could not be far away, and that my rescue, providing that I could keep above water, was but a question of a few minutes. But I was hardly prepared for the whale's next move. Being very near his and, the boat, or boats, had drawn off a bit, I supposed, for I could see nothing of them. Then I remembered the flurry. Almost at the same moment it began ; and there was I, who with fearful admiration had so often watched the titanic convulsions of a dying cachalot, actually in- volved in them. The turns were off my body, but I was able to twist a couple of turns round my arms, which, in case of hi, sounding, I could readily let go. Then all was lost in roar and rush, as of the heart of some mighty cataract, during which I was sometimes above, sometimes beneath, the water, but always clinging, with every ounce of energy still left, to the line. Now, one thought was uppermost= What if he should breach r I had seen them do so when in flurry, leaping full twenty feet it the air. Then I prayed. Quickly as all the preceding changes had passed came perfect peace. There I lay, still alive, but so weak that, although I could feel the turns slipping off my arms, and knew that I should slide off the slope of the whale's side into the sea if they did, I cculd make no effort to secure myself. Everything then passed away from me, just as if I had gone to sleep."

It is needless to say that Mr. Bullen escaped, or this book would never have been written. The story of this fight. though the most quotable, is not, however, the most exciting battle-picture here given to us. We would refer our readers in particular to the chapter called " Abner's Whale." Another extremely thrilling episode is the account of a fight between a great sperm whale and A gigantic octopus, or squid, which Mr. Bullen had once the good fortune to watch. This war of the Titans is finely told. Of course one takes the side of the whale, as the Knight In Math d'Arthur took the side of the lion he found in the forest fighting with the snake, "for he [the lion] was the more natural beast." A terrible incident is the death-struggle between the Yankee Captain and the colossal negro mate,—a struggle which ended in the drowning of both men. Yet even better than these is the wonderful story of how a boat's crew fought with a whale in a vast sea cave, of how the tide closed the door of the cave, and of how, with the phosphorescent water gleaming round them, there entered into this dread hall of the sea a crowd of ravenous sharks. But all these tales of the deep we must leave untouched. It is indeed hardly fair to mention them in this bold way, lest our readers should imagine that Mr. Bullen's work is a sort of encyclopaedia of Mun- chausen-like episodes. It is, in truth, nothing of the kind, but a perfectly serious, and, as far as we can judge, quite trustworthy, narrative of the whale - fishery. To reed it is not merely to be delighted, but to be con- awed. The book rings true throughout, though doubtless the writer is a man of fine imagination, possessed with the gift of words. He does not see things grey, but in bright, clear colours, but that does not detract from the value and reality of his work. It is one which any man might be proud of having written, and one such as no man who has been a sailor before the mast has ever written before. Plenty of common sailors have risen to wealth and position, but we know of no previous case in which a man has sailed before the mast and yet noted with the eye of an artist, and recorded with the sense of a man of letters, all the moods of the ocean, of the mighty creatures that inhabit its depths, and of the men who make their living on the waters.