English translation
[4999] 18 - (...) 'Amr heard Jābir bin 'Abdullāh say: "The Messenger of Allāh ﷺ sent us, three hundred riders, with Abū 'Ubaidah bin Al-Jarrāh in charge, to keep a lookout for the caravan of the Quraish. We stayed on the coast for half a month, and we were stricken with such intense hunger that we ate leaves, and it was called the Army of Leaves. Then the sea threw out to us a beast called Al-'Anbar (sperm whale) and we ate from it for half a month and rubbed its fat on our bodies, until our bodies grew strong. Abū 'Ubaidah took one of its ribs and set it up, then he looked for the tallest man in the army and the tallest camel. He mounted the man on the camel, and he passed beneath it. And a number of men sat in its eye socket, and we extracted such and such number of pitchers of fat from its eye socket. Abū 'Ubaidah used to give each one of us a handful of dates at a time, then he gave us one date at a time, and when he ran out we felt its loss."