The most dreadful display of the Whale’s strength and prowess yet authentically recorded, was that made on the American Whale ship Essex, Captain Pollard, which sailed from Nantucket for the Pacific Ocean, in August 1849 [sic – it was 1819]. Late in the fall of the same year, when in the latitude forty of the South Pacific, a school of sperm Whales were discovered, and three boats were manned and sent in pursuit. The mate’s boat was struck by one of them, and he was obliged to return to the ship in order to repair the damage.

While he was engaged in that work, a sperm Whale, judged to be eighty three feet long broke water twenty rods from the ship on her weather bow. He was going at the rate of about three knots an hour, and the ship at nearly the same rate, when he struck the bow of the vessel just forward of her chains.