BESET BY WHALES.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LVII, Issue 6535, 6 February 1882, Page 5

BESET BY WHALES.

A New York telegram to a Cincinnati paper, of Nor. 14, gives an account of the remarkable experience of Captain Sandberg, of the iron steamship Newport, of the New York and Coba Mail Steamship Line. Be* ferring to his last trip he said “ We left New York with 113 passenger* on board, and next morning at about eight o’clock, off the Capes of Delaware, we ran into an immense school of whales. Such a sight I never saw before, and I believe nobody before ever did. They were the regular sperm whales, the most valuable known to commerce, and the school was certainly from a quarter to a half mile wide, and 20 miles in length. There were millions of them—enough to load down every vessel in the port of New York. The weather was delightful, the sea smooth, and the passenger* were mostly on deck. The whales were of all sizes, from small ones np to great fellows sixty-five and seventy feet in length. Suddenly I felt a shock of running into something. The vessel had ran on to one of them, a whale fully sixty feet in length striking it at right angles about in its middle. The headway ef the vessel was not perceptibly diminished, although the shock nearly threw every one from their feet. As the vessel struck the whale the creature threw up its flukes, and a perfect deluge of water came over the bow. The sharp bow of the vessel cut the monster completely in two, the head coming up on the starboard and the tail on the port side. As the ports went astern the sea was covered with blood and entrails. The whale would hare yielded three or four hundred barrels of oil. No damage was done to anything except the steam steering gear. The shock threw this out of order, the concussion closing some of the valves, and for some little time, until this could be fixed, we had to steer the vessel by hand. We were going at the rate of fifteen knots an hour. The whales were everywhere, on all sides, as far as we could see. When the severed head of the whale came up it shot up six feet in the air, so that everybody could see it. Everybody was thunderstruck. Ten minutes later we experienced another and a severer shock. We had run plump over another and a still larger one. The mate was standing at the bow this time, and we struck it squarely, and cut this one in two, just as we did the first one. The head sunk and then rose on the port side, but the body passed under the ship. The vessel was shaken from stem to stern, and the body of the whale struck the propeller as it came from under the ship. The engineer rushed on deck, thinking we had run over a log or had struck on an unknown rock. The headway was perceptibly lessened, and there was getting to be altogether too much of this sort of thing to be pleasant. Had it been in the night, and the whales not visible, I should certainly have thought we had touched a rock or ran over a wreck. I then ordered the course of the vessel to be changed, and we ran ont of the school, although they were visible for a long time afterwards at a distance.” The Newport is now in the dry dock in Brooklyn, but there is no sign of a collision to be seen. She is there simply for the purpose of having her bottom repainted, which is done regularly twice a year.