
    These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen
themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks - the
Coke-upon-Little-ton of the fist. True, among the more upright and honourable
whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases, where it would be an
outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim possession of a whale
previously chased or killed by another party. But others are by no means so
scrupulous.
    Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated in
England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of a whale in
the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had succeeded in
harpooning the fish; they were at last, through peril of their lives, obliged to
forsake not only their lines, but their boat itself. Ultimately the defendants
(the crew of another ship) came up with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and
finally appropriated it before the very eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those
defendants were remonstrated with, their captain snapped his fingers in the
plaintiffs' teeth, and assured them that by way of doxology to the deed he had
done, he would now retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had remained
attached to the whale at the time of the seizure. Wherefore the plaintiffs now
sued for the recovery of the value of their whale, line, harpoons, and boat.
    Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was the judge.
In the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went on to illustrate his
position, by alluding to a recent crim. con. case, wherein a gentleman, after in
vain trying to bridle his wife's viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon the
seas of life; but in the course of years, repenting of that step, he instituted
an action to recover possession of her. Erskine was on the other side; and he
then supported it by saying, that though the gentleman had originally harpooned
the lady, and had once had her fast, and only by reason of the great stress of
her plunging viciousness, had at last abandoned her; yet abandon her he did, so
that she became a loose-fish; and therefore when a subsequent gentleman
re-harpooned her, the lady then became that subsequent gentleman's property,
along with whatever harpoon might have been found sticking in her.
    Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the whale and
the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other.
    These pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard
