Captain Langsdorf's Dilemma

Captain langsdorf was attached to the russian admiral kursenstern's famous discovery expedition in the beginning of the present century. The ship, however, was by no means a large one and purchased by my uncle after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home. It was not till the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the northwest sprang up an uncommon large whale, the body of which was larger than the ship itself. We were thus placed in the most imminent danger as this gigantic creature, setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at least out of the water. But we found that, very happily, it had escaped entirely uninjured.