1 Reared in Charleston, he knew every inlet, creek, shoal and rock of the Carolina coast near that port, and he was equally at home in the waters around Wilmington.
2 One day she saw spouts, lowered her boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales.
3 Ere long, several of the whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale escaping from the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon the ship.
4 As is customary in those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one lone whale on the outskirts of the shoal.
5 For as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a delirious throb.
6 And first Sergestus is left behind, struggling on the steep rock and shoal water, and shouting in vain for help and learning to race with broken oars.
7 Many watch the retreat and slack of the sea, and leap boldly into the shoal water; others slide down the oars.
8 But not thy galley, Tarchon; for she dashes on a shoal, and swings long swaying on the cruel bank, pitching and slapping the flood, then breaks up, and lands her crew among the waves.
9 A few minutes later Tom was in the shoal water of the bar, wading toward the Illinois shore.
10 To the left of us there was the long uninterrupted shoal, and to the right a high, steep bank heavily overgrown with bushes.
11 Three the east forces from the deep into shallows and quicksands, piteous to see, dashes on shoals and girdles with a sandbank.
12 when Orion rising on us through the cloudrack with sudden surf bore us on blind shoals, and scattered us afar with his boisterous gales and whelming brine over waves and trackless reefs.
13 I call him thus, because he always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd.
14 The compact round body of its root expands into two broad, firm, flat palms or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness.