The harpooner missed the whale. He pulled his harpoon back into the boat slowly. Then the captain shouted at him. He said the man was only good for catching eels, and he asked if the man was afraid of a whale. The harpooner stood up. His face was hot. He dropped the harpoon, turned round and jumped head first into the sea. Another man in the boat saw this and caught him by the heel. The harpooner did not want to come back, but the men pulled him in. Later the captain said kind words to him because he was truly sorry.
This story is from 1839. J. N. Reynolds wrote it in a magazine called The Knickerbocker. The title was Mocha Dick: Or the White Whale of the Pacific. Mocha is an island near the coast of Chile. Spanish people lived there in the century before, but in Reynolds’s time nobody lived there. The weather is mild. The winters are almost like the summers.
The whale took his name from the island. Reynolds says the whale was not a bad animal. Sometimes he swam quietly around a ship, or he swam slowly between the boats. But the hunters did not like him. Everything changed when a harpoon hit him. Then the men often cut the line and ran back to the ship.
In 1955, a Dutch newspaper, Het Parool, told the story of his biggest fight. Mocha Dick came up from the water far away and fell on his side with a big noise. Six boats came out, two boats from each of three ships. The men waited twenty minutes over the place. Then the whale came up under a boat, but one man shouted and the men rowed back fast. An American boat came close and the harpoon hit the white skin. Then the whale turned. He caught a British boat, rolled on his side, took the boat in his mouth and shook it. Three ships and ninety men gave up the fight.
In Reynolds’s story, the men were eating breakfast the next morning. A man high up on the mast sang out, “There she breaches!” Everybody stood up. The captain came running and asked where.