The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-05-17
THE 0VEREDUCATED WHALE
ANCIENT MARINERS THEORY
 OF THE
Kathleen'S Lpss-Had Friend Who Thought Whales Might Be Traine to Aot as Torpedo Boats and Rams An Experiment. or the Bahamas and nm Unlooke For Insult

An Experiment. on the Bohamas and
 am UnIooked-F For Insult
 Dear me, that's too bad" murmured
 the Ancient Mariner, shaking his griz-
 zled head with melancholy concern
 Its a pity, but I always said trouble
 would come of it. When you go to fool
 ing with nature you can't expect any
 thing else.
 What is it? Why, this here case of
 the whaling bark Kathleen that was
 rammed and sunk by a sperm whale,
 leaving thee rev and the shippers wife
 and the shippers wife's parrot adrift,
 in open boats with no tobacco thou
 kind of personal responsibility for that
 there calamity; though Lord knows it
 want my fault, for done all I could
 to prevent it.
 Why do you suppose that there whale went for that there ship? The mate says it was revenge, because he seen his wife killed.
 Rats! There ain't but very little sentiment about bull sperm whale. He don't respond none as ar ule to the ten- der emotions. He don't go in for chv- airy like us-his motives is strictly practical
 "The whale rammed that ship because that was what he had been trained to do. He wasn't no wild whale-he was my long lost pet Little Willie.
 q bet if I'd been ther and whistled to him he'd have swum up to me smil- in and wagged his tail Did you ever see whale smile? Well, just go to the zoo and look at the hippopotamus through the biggest pair of op'ry glass es you can find, and you can get some idee of the effect
 How do know he was Little Willie? How wdo you know a cyclones struck a town when you aint seen it? By the results, don't you? Well, don't need no more to identify my pet.
 Of course there's some little discrep- ancies. The mate says the whale that struck the Kathleen was no feet long. Little Willie was 110 feet one inch and three quarters. But that ain't no fatal difference.
 You don't realize unless you've seen sperm whale in action how hard it is to take his measure within an inch or two under them circumstances. I've known men to miss it by as much as six inches--old hands at tlleb usiness, too
 ,te Once l heard lookout report a sea ser pent 450 feet long and when we got him aboard we packed him into a ness pork barrel. with room enough left for a mermaid.
 "The discrepancy about the weight lokos worse at first sight than the one about the length but there really ain't nothin in it. Them ate says the Kath- leen's whale weighed 100 tons. Little Willie weighed O3 tons 97 pounds 14 ounces and three-eights the last time I saw him, bat you know yourself how even people will loose flesh on poor board.
 t'As long as Willie stayed with us we always saw that he got plenty to eat, but after he left us he had to hustle for himself. I don't count that little loss of three tons or so as any evidence against his identification at all
 sTrainin' whales was Jim Kearneys | fad. There never was a greater genius than what Jim Kerney was, but he was reckless and sort of unbalanced. He got | the notion that trained whales was to be the great naval feature of the comin' i century. It made him eloquent to talk about 1t.
 "'The battle fleets of the future,' he would say, is cruisin' by fluke power through the tropic seas. They need no coalin' stations. no dry docks, no re- serves of men and ammunition. aNture is a keepin' them up in inexhaustible numbers for the nation that first has wit enough to use them, and that nation will have the mastery of the sea
 "Kearney was so possessed with this notion that he determined to begin try ing experiments himself. He had a bit of reef in the Bahamas that nobody ever visited and he persuaded me to go down there and help him.
 "I tried to get him to give the thing up. but you might as well try to flag automobile with red neck tie. He was just set and there wasn't anything for 1t but to to let him have Ms own way.
 "Kearney had schooner, the Ladv Mine, that used to be pilot boat and would sail in any kind of wea ther that a fnin' fish would live in. We cruised around in the northwest trades for while lookin' for sperm calf, for Rear ney said that to get the best results : from education you must catch 'em young.
 T won't bore you tellin' about that cruise. though it would make a mighty good story itself, but at last we caught pur calf and h'isted him into tank on ' Heck. Kearney named him Little Will lie after kid of his own Then we put Tor the reef, which had smooth Ia goon ' inside of it and was altogether as we'll ( ,ut out for a whale academy as any ( place you could find in the geography. t "Kearney's idee was to use his whales s mostly for rams, though sometimes for | orpedo boats. So he had a harness fit- g ed over Little Willie head, with a steel 'pur in front, and he trained him to go I ull tilt at an old hulk that was moored c or target. V