Another boat immediately followed, and unfortunately advanced too far.  The tail was again reared into the air in a terrific attitude.  The impending blow was evident.  The harpooner, who was directly underneath, leaped overboard, and the next moment the threatened stroke was impressed on the center of the boat, which it buried in the water.  Happily no one was injured.  The harpooner who leaped overboard escaped death by the act, the tail having struck the very spot on which he stood.  The effects of the blow were astonishing—­the keel was broken, the gunwales and every plank excepting two were cut through, and it was evident that the boat would have been completely divided, had not the tail struck directly upon a coil of lines.  The boat was rendered useless.

“The Dutch ship ‘Gort-Moolen,’ commanded by Cornelius Gerard Ouwekaas, with a cargo of seven fish, was anchored in Greenland, in the year 1660.  The captain, perceiving a whale ahead of his ship, beckoned his attendants and threw himself into a boat.  He was the first to approach the whale, and was fortunate enough to harpoon it before the arrival of the second boat, which was on the advance.  Jacques Vienkes, who had the direction of it, joined his captain immediately afterward, and prepared to make a second attack on the fish when it should remount to the surface.  At the moment of its ascension, the boat of Vienkes, happening, unfortunately, to be perpendicularly above it, was so suddenly and forcibly lifted up by a stroke of the head of the whale that it was dashed to pieces before the harpooner could discharge his weapon.  Vienkes flew along with the pieces of the boat, and fell upon the back of the animal.  This intrepid seaman, who still retained his weapon in his grasp, harpooned the whale on which he stood; and by means of the harpoon and the line, which he never abandoned, he steadied himself firmly upon the fish, notwithstanding his hazardous situation, and regardless of a considerable wound that he received in his leg in his fall along with the fragments of the boat.  All the efforts of the other boats to approach the whale and deliver the harpooner were futile.  The captain, not seeing any other method of saving his unfortunate companion, who was in some way entangled with the line, called him to cut it with his knife and betake himself to swimming.  Vienkes, embarrassed and disconcerted as he was, tried in vain to follow this council.  His knife was in the pocket of his drawers, and being unable to support himself with one hand, he could not get it out.  The whale, meanwhile, continued advancing along the surface of the water with great rapidity, but fortunately never attempted to dive.  While his comrades despaired of his life, the harpoon by which he held at length disengaged itself from the body of the whale.  Vienkes, being thus liberated, did not fail to take advantage of this circumstance.  He cast himself into the sea, and by swimming endeavored to regain the boats,