The next morning they returned to the wreck. As soon as DeBlois scrambled up the side, he saw “the prints of the [whale’s] teeth on the copper.. . . The hole was just the size of the whale’s head.” As DeBlois cut away the masts to right the ship, the ship’s bell continued to clang with the rhythmic heave of the sea. “[A] more mournful sound never fell on my ears,” he remembered. “It was as though it was tolling for our deaths.”
