This is from John Atkins Cook’s 1926 book Pursuing the Whale: A Quarter Century of Whaling in the Arctic, written to keep the romance of whaling alive.
As we hauled the line bringing the boat nearer, the whale turned on our boat. We dodged him as he made his mad rush, and I shot a bomb, following it up with a thrust of the hand lance that I knew gave him his mortal wound. But he was not done with us, for, failing to catch us that time, he settled under water only for an instant, when, coming to the surface directly under the boat, he caught it in his jaws and bit it in two halves with no more trouble than we take to crack an egg.
More dramatic is the demise of said whale, which “rolled on his side just as he closed his jaws … with just life enough left to set his teeth into the wood.”