IT CHAPTER XIX BIG GAME WITH A REVOLVER is not essential that one should be a whaler to go a-whaling. I have never cared to emulate the escapades of the old-time whalers who sent their boats after the biggest living animals and took them in a hand-to-hand battle, and were often tossed into the air for their pains. It is exciting enough to read about their exploits in the very highest field of desperate chance. My own exploits with whales as a layman are very tame, yet once when Mr. Hancock Banning undertook to aid me in photographing a seventyfoot sulphur-bottom by sending his launch almost over the tail of the whale I thought it sufficiently exciting, and I could imagine the sensation of a man who has rowed twenty feet farther than my position trying to harpoon or lance a whale. Armed with a camera I was stationed in the bow of the launch Torqua, and Mr. Banning managed to get me fairly upon the whale, so near, in fact, that he refused to come up. We had been chasing these whales about for some time, and now as I looked down from my point of vantage in the bow, I must have been exactly over the whale's tail and the rush and boiling of the water was so terrific, due to its screw-like motion, that the surface was forced up, and with it the bow of the launch several inches on the principle of steaming over a powerful spring. The sulphur-bottom has, in California waters at least, a playful habit of swimming on the surface a while, then sounding by throwing its tail and half of its body into the air. I was well aware of this pleasantry, having observed it in the Santa Catalina channel, and one day I saw a sixty- or seventy-foot whale rise and clear the water, standing for a second apparently on its tail. Knowing this I could not but wonder what would happen to me if the big fin should come up. That we would have gone up, there could be little doubt. But nothing happened, nor did I get my picture. Later a friendly whale swam for some time alongside of a steamer I was on, the Hermosa, and was photographed, so near that its eye was plainly seen and its puff of hot breath, "spout," caught. Again, I drifted about with Mr. E. L. Doran one day off Santa Catalina, trying to photograph the big California gray whale, probably fifty or sixty feet long, but I did not succeed although the animals were |