Indeed, in the days when the ocean was more densely populated with these huge animals, collision with a whale was a well-recognized maritime peril.

How many of the stout vessels against whose names on the shipping list stands the fatal word "missing," came to their ends in this way can never be known; but maritime annals are full of the reports of captains who ran "bows on" into a mysterious reef where the chart showed no obstruction, but which proved to be a whale, reddening the sea with his blood, and sending the ship--not less sorely wounded--into some neighboring port to refit.
The tools with which the business of hunting the whale is pursued are simple, even rude.

Steam, it is true, has succeeded to sails, and explosives have displaced the sinewy arm of the harpooner for launching the deadly shafts; but in the main the pursuit of the monsters is conducted now as it was sixty years ago, when to command a whaler was the dearest ambition of a New England coastboy.

The vessels were usually brigs or barks, occasionally schooners, ranging from 100 to 500 tons.

They had a characteristic architecture, due in part to the subordination of speed to carrying capacity, and further to the specially heavy timbering about the bows to withstand the crushing of the Arctic ice-pack.