Moreover, the sperm-whale had in him qualities of value that made him a richer prize than his Greenland cousin.
True, he lacked the useful bone.

His feeding habits did not necessitate a sieve, for, as beseems a giant, he devoured stout victuals, pieces of great squids--the fabled devil-fish--as big as a man's body being found in his stomach.

Such a diet develops his fighting qualities, and while the right whale usually takes the steel sullenly, and dies like an overgrown seal, the cachalot fights fiercely, now diving with such a rush that he has been known to break his jaw by the fury with which he strikes the bottom at the depth of 200 fathoms; now raising his enormous bulk in air, to fall with an all-obliterating crash upon the boat which holds his tormentors, or sending boat and men flying into the air with a furious blow of his gristly flukes, or turning on his back and crunching his assailants between his cavernous jaws.

Descriptions of the dying flurry of the sperm-whale are plentiful in whaling literature, many of the best of them being in that ideal whaleman's log "The Cruise of the Cachalot," by Frank T.Bullen.I quote one of these: "Suddenly the mate gave a howl: 'Starn all--starn all! Oh, starn!' and the oars bent like canes as we obeyed--there was an upheaval of the sea just ahead; then slowly, majestically, the vast body of our foe rose into the air.

Up, up it went while my heart stood still, until the whole of that immense creature hung on high, apparently motionless, and then fell--a hundred tons of solid flesh--back into the sea.