THROUGH THE ROARING FORTIES
Before leaving the islands, we shipped a Portuguese negro boat-steerer to take the place of the Night King. He was coal black, had a wild roll to his eyes, an explosive, spluttering way of talking, looked strikingly like a great ape, and had little more than simian intelligence. His feet had the reputation of being the largest feet in the Hawaiian Islands. When I had seen them I was prepared to believe they were the largest in the world. He was dubbed "Big Foot" Louis, and the nickname stuck to him during the voyage. He came aboard barefooted. I don't know whether he could find any shoes in the islands big enough to fit him or not. Anyway, he didn't need shoes in the tropics.
When we began to get north into cold weather he needed them badly, and there were none on board large enough for him to get his toes in.The captain went through his stock of Eskimo boots, made of walrus hide and very elastic, but they were too small. When we entered the region of snow, Louis was still running about the deck barefooted. As a last resort he sewed himself a pair of canvas shoes—regular meal sacks—and wore them through snow and blizzard and during the cold season when we were in the grip of the Behring Sea ice pack. Up around Behring straits the captain hired an Eskimo to make a pair of walrus hide boots big enough for Louis to wear, and Louis wore them until we got back to San Francisco and went ashore in them. I met him wandering along Pacific Street in his walrus hides. However, he soon found a pair of brogans which he could wear with more or less comfort.
One night while I was knocking about the Barbary Coast with my shipmates we heard dance music and the sound of revelry coming from behind the swinging doors of the Bow Bells saloon, a free-and-easy resort. We stepped inside. Waltzing around the room with the grace of a young bowhead out of water was "Big-Foot"Louis, his arm around the waist of a buxom negress, and on his feet nothing but a pair of red socks. We wondered what had become of his shoes and spied them on the piano, which the "professor" was vigorously strumming. Louis seemed to be having more fun than anybody, and was perfectly oblivious to the titters of the crowd and to the fact that it was notde rigueuron the Barbary Coast to dance in one's socks.
We left the Hawaiian Islands late in March and, standing straight north, soon left the tropics behind, never to see them again on the voyage. As we plunged into the "roaring forties" we struck our first violent storm. The fury of the gale compelled us to heave to under staysails and drift, lying in the troughs of the seas and riding the waves sidewise. The storm was to me a revelation of what an ocean gale could be. Old sailors declared they never had seen anything worse. The wind shrieked and whistled in the rigging like a banshee. It was impossible to hear ordinary talk and the men had to yell into each other's ears. We put out oil bags along theweather side to keep the waves from breaking. But despite the oil that spread from them over the water, giant seas frequently broke over the brig. One crushed the waist boat into kindling wood and sent its fragments flying all over the deck. We were fortunate to have several other extra boats in the hold against just such an emergency. Waves sometimes filled the ship to the top of the bulwarks and the sailors waded about up to their breasts in brine until the roll of the vessel spilled the water overboard or it ran back into the sea through the scuppers and hawse-holes.
The waves ran as high as the topsail yard. They would pile up to windward of us, gaining height and volume until we had to look up almost vertically to see the tops. Just as a giant comber seemed ready to break in roaring foam and curl over and engulf us, the staunch little brig would slip up the slope of water and ride over the summit in safety. Then the sea would shoot out on the other side of the vessel with a deafening hiss like that of a thousand serpents and rush skyward again, the wall of waterstreaked and shot with foam and looking like a polished mass of jade or agate.
I had not imagined water could assume such wild and appalling shapes. Those monster waves seemed replete with malignant life, roaring out their hatred of us and watching alertly with their devilish foam-eyes for a chance to leap upon us and crush us or sweep us to death on their crests.
I became genuinely seasick now for the first time. A little touch of seasickness I had experienced in the tropics was as nothing. To the rail I went time and again to give up everything within me, except my immortal soul, to the mad gods of sea. For two days I lay in my bunk. I tried pickles, fat bacon, everything that any sailor recommended, all to no purpose. I would have given all I possessed for one fleeting moment upon something level and still, something that did not plunge and lurch and roll from side to side and rise and fall. I think the most wretched part of seasickness is the knowledge that you cannot run away from it, that you are penned in with it, that go where you will, on theroyal yard or in the bilge, you cannot escape the ghastly nightmare even for a minute.
There is no use fighting it and no use dosing yourself with medicines or pickles or lemons or fat meat. Nothing can cure it. In spite of everything it will stay with you until it has worked its will to the uttermost, and then it will go away at last of its own accord, leaving you a wan, limp wreck. I may add, to correct a general impression, that it is impossible to become seasoned to seasickness. One attack does not render the victim immune from future recurrences. I was very sick once again on the voyage. After a season ashore, the best sailors are liable to seasickness, especially if they encounter rough weather soon after leaving port. Some time later we were frozen solidly in Behring Sea for three weeks. When a storm swell from the south broke up the ice and the motionless brig began suddenly to rock and toss on a heavy sea, every mother's son aboard, including men who had been to sea all their lives, was sick. Not one escaped.
Unalaska
Unalaska
During the storm we kept a man at the wheel and another on the try-works as a lookout. One day during my trick at the wheel, I was probably responsible for a serious accident, though it might have happened with the most experienced sailor at the helm. To keep the brig in the trough of the seas, I was holding her on a certain point of the compass, but the big waves buffeted the vessel about with such violence that my task was difficult. Captain Shorey was standing within arm's length of me, watching the compass. A sea shoved the brig's head to starboard and, as if it had been lying in ambush for just such an opportunity, a giant comber came curling in high over the stern. It smashed me into the wheel and for an instant I was buried under twenty feet of crystal water that made a green twilight all about us.
Then the wave crashed down ponderously upon the deck and I was standing in clear air again. To my astonishment, the captain was no longer beside me. I thought he had been washed overboard. The wave had lifted him upon its top, swept him high over the skylight the entire length of the quarter-deck and droppedhim on the main deck in the waist. His right leg was broken below the knee. Sailors and boat-steerers rushed to him and carried him into the cabin, where Mr. Winchester set the broken bones. We put into Unalaska a week later and the surgeon of the revenue cutterBearreset the leg. This was in the last days of March. The captain was on crutches in July, when we caught our first whale.
The storm did not blow itself out. It blew us out of it. We must have drifted sidewise with the seas about six hundred miles. At dawn of the second day, after leaving the fury of the forties behind, we were bowling along in smooth water with all sails set. The sky was clear and the sea like hammered silver. Far ahead a mountain rose into the sky—a wedge-shaped peak, silver-white with snow, its foot swathed in purple haze. It rose above Unimak Pass, which connects the Pacific Ocean and Behring Sea between Unimak and Ugamok islands of the Fox Island chain.
Unimak Pass is ten miles broad, and its towering shores are sheer, black, naked rock. Mr.Winchester, who had assumed command after the captain had broken his leg, set a course to take us directly through the passage. Running before a light breeze that bellied all our sails, we began to draw near the sea gorge at the base of the mountain. Then, without warning, from over the horizon came a savage white squall, blotting out mountain, pass, sea, and sky.
I never saw bad weather blow up so quickly. One moment the ship was gliding over a smooth sea in bright sunlight. The next, a cloud as white and almost as thick as wool had closed down upon it; snow was falling heavily in big, moist flakes, a stiff wind was heeling the vessel on its side, and we could not see ten feet beyond the tip of the jib boom.
The wind quickened into a gale. By fast work we managed to furl sails and double-reef the topsail before they carried away. Soon the deck was white with four or five inches of snow. On the forecastle-head Big Foot Louis was posted as lookout. Everybody was anxious. Mr. Winchester took his stand close by the main shrouds at the break of the poop and kept gazingahead through his glasses into the mist. The sailors and boat-steerers crowded the forward rails, peering vainly into the swirling fog. Big Foot Louis bent forward with his hand shielding his eyes from the falling snow.
"Land, land!" he cried.
If it were land that Louis saw through the clouds and blinding snow, it was mighty close. Our doom seemed sealed. We expected the ship to crash bows-on upon the rocks. We nerved ourselves for the shock. A momentary vision of shipwreck on those bleak coasts in snow and storm obsessed me. But Louis's eyes had deceived him. The ship went riding on its stately way through the blinding snow before the gale.
The situation was ticklish, if not critical. We had been headed squarely for the passage before the storm closed down. Now we could not see where we were going. If we held directly upon our course we were safe. If the gale blew us even slightly out of our way, shipwreck and death on the rock-bound shore awaited us. Which would it be?
Mr. Winchester was a man of iron nerve. Hedemonstrated this now as he did many times afterward. He was as skillful a navigator as he was a fearless one. He knew his reckonings were good. He knew that when the squall shut out the world the brig's nose was pointed directly at the center of Unimak Pass. So he did not veer to east or west, or seek to tack back from the dangerous coasts on our bows, but drove the vessel straight upon its course into the blank white wall of mist and snow.
An hour later the squall lifted as quickly as it had come. Blue skies and sunshine came back. We found ourselves almost becalmed on a placid sea. To the south lay the outline of a lofty coast.
A boat-steerer bustled forward. "We are in Behring Sea," he said with a laugh.
We had shot through the narrow channel without sighting the shores. I have often wondered just how close to port or starboard death was to us that morning on the black cliffs of Unimak Pass.
IN THE ICE
From Unalaska, into which port we put to have the captain's leg attended to, the brig stood northwesterly for the spring whaling on the bowhead and right whale grounds off the Siberian coast. We were a week's sail from the Fox Islands when we encountered our first ice. It appeared in small chunks floating down from the north. The blocks became more numerous until they dappled the sea. They grew in size. Strings and floes appeared. Then we brought up against a great ice field stretching to the north as far as the eye could see. It was all floe ice broken into hummocks and pressure ridges and pinnacles, with level spaces between. There were no towering 'bergs such as are launched into the sea from the glaciers on the Greenland coast andthe Pacific coast of Alaska. The highest 'berg I saw on the voyage was not more than forty feet high. It was composed of floe ice which had been forced upward by the pressure of the pack.
The crow's nest was now rigged and placed in position on the cross-trees abaft the fore-mast, between the topsail and the fore-top-gallant-sail yard. It was a square box of heavy white canvas nailed upon a wooden frame-work. When a man stood in it the canvas sides reached to his breast and were a protection against the bitter winds. From early morning until dark an officer and a boat-steerer occupied the crow's nest and kept a constant lookout for whales.
As soon as we struck the ice the captain's slop-chest was broken open and skin clothes were dealt out to the men. Accoutred for cold weather, I wore woolen underwear and yarn socks next my flesh; an outer shirt of squirrel skin with hood or parka; pants and vest of hair seal of the color and sheen of newly minted silver; a coat of dogskin that reached almost to my knees; a dogskin cap; deer-skin socks with the hair inside over my yarn socks; walrus-hide bootsand walrus-hide mittens over yarn mittens. The walrus-boots were fastened by a gathering string just below the knees and by thongs of tanned skin about the ankle. Some of the men wore heavy reindeer-skin coats. The skin clothes worn by the officers and boat-steerers were of finer quality and more pretentious. Perhaps the handsomest costume was that of Little Johnny. It consisted of coat, vest, and trousers of silvery hair-seal, with the edges of the coat trimmed with the snowwhite fur of fur-seal pups. With this he wore a black dogskin cap and walrus-hide boots.
While we were among the ice, the officer in the crow's nest directed the course of the brig. Whaling officers are great fellows to show their skill by just grazing dangerous ice. Many a time we green hands stood with our hearts in our mouths as the ship seemed about to crash into a 'berg bows-on.
"Starboard, sir," the helmsman would respond.
"Starboard," would come the order from aloft.
Waiting For the Floes to Open
Waiting For the Floes to Open
The bow would swing slowly to one side and the 'berg would go glancing along the rail so close perhaps that we could have grabbed a snowball off some projection.
"Steady," the officer would call.
"Steady, sir." The bow would stop in its lateral swing.
"Port."
"Port, sir." The bow would swing the other way.
"Steady." We would be upon our old course again.
Once I remember the mate was in the crow's nest and had been narrowly missing ice all day for the fun of the thing—"showing off," as we rather disturbed green hands said. A 'berg about thirty feet high, a giant for Behring Sea waters, showed a little ahead and to leeward of our course. The mate thought he could pass to windward. He kept the brig close to the wind until the 'berg was very near. Then he saw a windward passage was impossible and tried suddenly to go to leeward.
"Hard up your wheel," he cried.
"Hard up it is, sir."
The bow swung toward the 'berg—swung slowly, slowly across it. The tip of the jib-boom almost rammed a white pinnacle. Just when everybody was expecting the brig to pile up in wreck on the ice, the great 'berg swept past our starboard rail. But we had not missed it. Its jagged edges scraped a line an inch deep along our side from bow to stern.
Shootingokchug(or, as it is sometimes spelled, ooksook) or hair seals was a favorite amusement in the spring ice. The mate was an expert with a rifle. He shot many as they lay sunning themselves on ice cakes. Okchugs are as large as oxen and are covered with short silvery hair so glossy that it fairly sparkles. If an okchug was killed outright, its head dropped over upon the ice and it lay still. If only slightly wounded, the animal flounced off into the sea. If vitally hurt, it remained motionless with its head up and glaring defiance, whereupon a boat's crew would row out to the ice cake and a sailor would finish the creature with a club.
It was exciting to step on a small ice cake to face a wounded and savage okchug. The animalwould come bouncing on its flippers straight at one with a vicious barking roar. The nose was the okchug's most vulnerable point. A tap on the nose with a club would stretch the great creature out dead. It required a cool head, a steady nerve, and a good aim to deliver this finishing stroke upon the small black snout. If one missed or slipped on the ice, the possible consequences would not have been pleasant. We tanned the skins of the okchugs and made them into trousers or "pokes." The meat was hung over the bows to keep in an ice-box of all outdoors. Ground up and made into sausages, it was apièce de resistanceon the forecastle bill of fare.
One night in the latter part of May we saw far off a great light flaring smokily across the sea. It was what is known in whaler parlance as a bug-light and was made by blazing blubber swinging in an iron basket between the two smokestacks of a whale-ship's try-works. By it the crew of that distant ship was working at trying out a whale. The bug-light signaled to all the whaling fleet the first whale of the season.
The great continent of ice drifting southward gradually closed round the fleet. The ships had worked so far in there was no escape. In the early part of June the brig was frozen in. For three weeks the vessel remained motionless in solid ice with every stitch of canvas furled. No water or land was in sight—nothing but one great sweep of broken and tumbled ice as far as the eye could see. Those three ice-bound June weeks were given over to idleness. A stove was placed in the forecastle and was kept going night and day. This made it possible to keep comfortable and to read.
We went on frequent seal hunts. We strolled across the frozen sea to visit the other ships, the nearest of which was two miles away. Visiting is called "gamming" by whalers. We learned the gossip of the fleet, who had taken the first whale, how many whales had been caught, the adventures of the ships, the comedies and tragedies of the whaling season.
We established, too, what we called the "Behring Sea Circulating Library." There were a number of books in every forecastle. Thesegreasy, dog-eared volumes were passed about from ship to ship. Perhaps there were twenty books aboard the brig which had been read by almost every member of the crew, forward and aft. Before we got out of the ice, we had exchanged these volumes for an entirely new lot from other ships.
One morning I awoke with the ship rocking like a cradle. I pulled on my clothes and hurried on deck. The ice fields were in wild commotion. Great swells from some storm upon the open sea to the south were rolling under them. Crowded and tumultuous waves of ice twenty feet high chased each other across the frozen fields from horizon to horizon. The ship would sink for a moment between ridges of ice and snow, and then swing up on the crest of an ice mountain. Great areas of ice would fall away as if the sea had opened beneath them. Then they would shoot up and shut out half the sky. The broken and jagged edges of these white and solid billows appeared for an instant like a range of snowy sierras which, in another instant, would crumble from view as if some seismic cataclysmhad shaken them down in ruin. The air was filled with grinding, crushing, ominous noises and explosions.
The ship was in imminent peril. In that mad turmoil of ice it seemed certain she would be ground to pieces. Captain Shorey, who was hobbling about on crutches, ordered a cask of bread, a cask of water, and a barrel of beef hoisted on deck ready to be thrown out on an ice cake in case the brig were wrecked and we were cast away.
In the grinding of the floes, the ship became wedged in between two immense pieces of ice. The great bergs washed closer and closer. When they rose on some tremendous billow, great caverns, washed out by the sea, appeared in their sides like mouths, edged with splinters and points of blue and glittering ice, like fangs. As they rose and fell, it seemed the two white monsters were opening and closing devouring maws for us while the suck of the water in their ice caves made noises like the roar of hungry beasts of prey.
A cable was run out hurriedly over the bowand a bowline at the end of it was slipped over a hummock of ice. With the inboard end wound around the windlass, all hands worked like beavers to heave the brig out of her dangerous position. It was all the crew could do to swing the windlass bars up and down. The ship went forward slowly, almost imperceptibly, and all the time the great bergs swept closer and closer. For a long time it looked as if we were doomed. There was no doubt about the ship's fate if the bergs struck it. But inch by inch, heave by heave, we hauled her through. Ten minutes later, the ice monsters came together with a force that would have crushed an ironclad.
Gradually patches of clear water began to appear in the ice. It was as though the white fields were opening great blue eyes. Little lakes and zigzag lanes of water formed. Sails were set. The brig began to work her way along. Soon she was swinging on heavy billows—not white billows of ice but green billows of water, thick with ice in stars and constellations.
CROSS COUNTRY WHALING
We had hardly washed clear of the ice in the heavy seas when "Blow!" rang from the crow's nest. A school of whales close ahead, covering the sea with fountains, was coming leisurely toward the ship. There were more than thirty of them.
"Bowheads!" shouted the mate.
Their great black heads rose above the surface like ponderous pieces of machinery; tall fountains shot into the air; the wind caught the tops of the fountains and whisked them off in smoke; hollow, sepulchral whispers of sound came to the brig as the breath left the giant lungs in mighty exhalations. Why they were called bowheads was instantly apparent—the outline of the top of the head curved like an Indian's bow. As the head sank beneath thesurface, the glistening back, half as broad as a city street and as black as asphalt, came spinning up out of the sea and went spinning down again.
Our crippled captain in his fur clothes and on crutches limped excitedly about the quarter-deck glaring at $300,000 worth of whales spouting under his nose. But with so much ice about and such a heavy sea running he was afraid to lower.
If the whales saw the brig they gave no sign. They passed all around the vessel, the spray of their fountains blowing on deck. One headed straight for the ship. The mate seized a shoulder bomb-gun and ran to the bow. The whale rose, blew a fountain up against the jib-boom, and dived directly beneath the brig's forefoot. As its back curled down, the mate, with one knee resting on the starboard knighthead, took aim and fired. He surely hit the whale—there was little chance to miss. But the bomb evidently did not strike a vital spot, for the leviathan passed under the ship, came up on the other side and went on about its business.
The sight of all these whales passing by us with such unconcern, blowing water on us as if in huge contempt, almost seeming to laugh at us and mock our bombs and harpoons and human skill, drove the captain frantic. Should he allow that fortune in whales to escape him without a try for it? With purple face and popping eyes he gazed at the herd now passing astern.
"Lower them boats!" he cried.
"What?" expostulated Mr. Landers. "Do you want to get us all killed?"
"Lower them boats!" yelled the skipper.
"Don't you know that a boat that gets fast to a whale in that ice will be smashed, sure?"
"Lower them boats!" shouted the captain.
Mr. Winchester, enthusiastic and fearless whaleman that he was, was eager for the captain's order. His boat and Mr. Landers's went down. The waist boat—mine—was left on its davits. But Gabriel, its boatheader, armed with a shoulder gun, went in the mate's boat. Left aboard to help work ship, I had an opportunity to view that exciting chase from beginning to end.
With storm-reefed sails, the boats went plunging away over the big seas, dodging sharply about to avoid the ice cakes. Not more than two hundred yards away on our starboard beam a great whale was blowing. The mate marked it and went for it like a bull dog. He steered to intercept its course. It was a pretty piece of maneuvering. The whale rose almost in front of him and his boat went shooting upon its back. Long John let fly his harpoon. Gabriel fired a bomb from his shoulder gun. There was a flurry of water as the whale plunged under. Back and forth it slapped with its mighty flukes as it disappeared, narrowly missing the boat. Down came the boat's sail. It was bundled up in a jiffy and the mast slewed aft until it stuck out far behind. Out went the sweeps. The mate stood in the stern wielding a long steering oar. I could see the whale line whipping and sizzling out over the bows.
For only a moment the whale remained beneath the surface. Then it breached. Its black head came shooting up from the water like a titanic rocket. Up went the great body into theair until at least forty feet of it was lifted against the sky like some weird, mighty column, its black sides glistening and its belly showing white. Then the giant bulk crashed down again with a smack on the sea that might have been heard for miles and an impact that sent tons of water splashing high in air. For an instant the monster labored on the water as if mortally hurt, spouting up fountains of clotted blood that splattered over the ice blocks and turned them from snow white to crimson. Then a second time the whale sounded and went speeding away to windward, heading for the ice pack.
It dragged the boat at a dizzy clip despite the fact that the line was running out so fast as to seem to the men in the boat a mere vibrant, indistinct smear of yellow. The boat was taken slicing through the big waves, driving its nose at times beneath the water, and knocking against lumps of ice. A long ice block appeared in its course. A collision seemed inevitable unless the boat was cut loose from the whale.
Captain Shorey was watching the chase with fierce intentness as he leaned upon his crutcheson the forecastle head. He had been filled with great joy, seized with anxiety or shaken with anger as the hunt passed from one phase to another. He shouted his emotions aloud though there was never a chance for the men in the boats to hear him.
"Good boy, Long John," he had cried when the boatsteerer drove his harpoon home.
"That's our fish," he had chortled as the wounded leviathan leaped high against the sky and spouted blood over the ice.
Now when it seemed possible that the mate would be forced to cut loose from the whale to save his boat from destruction, the captain danced about on his crutches in wild excitement.
"Don't cut that line! Don't cut that line!" he yelled.
Mr. Winchester realized as well as the captain that there was something like $10,000 on the other end of the rope, and he had no idea of cutting loose. Towed by the whale the boat drove toward the ice. The mate worked hard with his steering oar to avoid striking the block. It was impossible. The bow smashed into oneend of the ice cake, was lifted out of the water and dragged across to slip back into the sea. A hole was stove in the starboard bow through which the water rushed. The crew thereafter was kept busy bailing.
It was evident from the fountains of blood that the whale was desperately wounded, but its vitality was marvelous and it seemed it might escape. When Mr. Landers saw the mate's line being played out so rapidly he should have hurried to the mate's boat and bent the line from his own tub to the end of the mate's line. As an old whaleman Mr. Landers knew what to do in this crisis, but in such ice and in such high seas he preferred not to take a chance. He was a cautious soul, so he held his boat aloof. The mate waved to him frantically. Long John and Gabriel wigwagged frenzied messages with waving arms.
As for Captain Shorey on his crutches on the forecastle head, when it seemed certain that the whale would run away with all the mate's line and escape, he apparently suffered temporary aberration. He damned old man Landers inevery picturesque and fervent term of an old whaleman's vocabulary. He shook his fist at him. He waved a crutch wildly.
"Catch that whale!" he yelled in a voice husky and broken with emotion. "For God's sake, catch that whale!"
All this dynamic pantomime perhaps had its effect on Landers. At any rate, his men began to bend to their sweeps and soon his boat was alongside that of the mate. His line was tied to the free end of the rope in the mate's almost exhausted tub just in time. The mate's line ran out and Landers' boat now became fast to the whale.
Fortune favored Landers. His boat was dragged over the crests of the seas at thrilling speed, but he managed to keep clear of ice. The whale showed no sign of slowing down. In a little while it had carried away all the line in Mr. Landers' tub. The monster was free of the boats at last. It had ceased to come to the surface to blow. It had gone down into the deep waters carrying with it the mate's harpoon and 800 fathoms of manila rope. It seemed probableit had reached the safety of the ice pack and was lost.
The boats came back to the brig; slowly, wounded, limping over the waves. The flying spray had frozen white over the fur clothes of the men, making them look like snow images. They climbed aboard in silence. Mr. Landers had a hang-dog, guilty look. The skipper was a picture of gloom and smoldering fury. He bent a black regard upon Mr. Landers as the latter swung over the rail, but surprised us all by saying not a word.
When the next day dawned, we were out of sight of ice, cruising in a quiet sea. A lookout posted on the forecastle head saw far ahead a cloud of gulls flapping about a dark object floating on the surface. It was the dead whale.
CUTTING IN AND TRYING OUT
Two boats were sent to secure the whale. I lowered with one. As we came up to the whale, I marveled at its immense bulk. It looked even larger than when it had breached and I had seen it shoot up, a giant column of flesh and blood, against the heavens. It had turned belly up as dead whales do, its ridged white abdomen projecting above the waves. It seemed much like a mighty white and black rock, against which the waves lapped lazily. Seventy-five feet long the officers estimated it—an unusually large bull whale. I had never imagined any animal so large. I had seen Jumbo, said to be the largest elephant ever in captivity. Jumbo made ordinary circus elephants seem like pigmies. This whale was as big as a dozen Jumbos. The great hairy mammoth, of which I had seenstuffed specimens in museums, would have seemed a mere baby beside this monster of the deep.
As proof that the whale was ours, the harpoon sticking in its back bore the brig's name, and fast to the haft and floating far out on the sea in a tangled mass was the 800 fathoms of line from the brig's two tubs. Our first work was to recover the line. As this had to be straightened out and coiled in the boats, it was a long and tedious job. Then with a short sharp spade, a hole was cut through the whale's flukes and a cable passed through and made fast. With both boats strung out along the cable, the men bent to the sweeps, hauling the carcass slowly toward the brig. Meanwhile the vessel had been sailing toward us. So we had but a hundred yards or so to pull.
The loose end of the hawser was passed through the hawse-hole in the starboard bow and made fast to the fore-bitt. In this way the flukes were held close to the bow. As the brig made headway under short sail, the great body washed back against the vessel's side and lay upon thesurface, the head abreast the wheel on the quarter-deck—which will give an idea of the whale's length.
The gang-plank was taken from the bulwarks and a cutting stage lowered over the whale. This stage was made of three broad planks. Two projected from the ship's side, the third joined their outer ends. Along the inside of the third plank was a low railing. Two officers took their station on the outer plank with long-handled spades to cut in the blubber. The spade was enough like a garden spade in shape to suggest its name and was fastened to a long pole. Its cutting edge was as sharp as a razor.
A block and tackle was rigged above the whale, the upper block fastened to the cross-trees of the main mast and the tackle carried forward to the windlass. A great hook was fastened into the whale's blubber, and everything was ready for the cutting in.
As the officers with their spades cut under the blubber, the sailors heaved on the windlass. The blanket piece of blubber began to rise. As it rose, the officers kept spading under it, rollingthe whale over gradually. Thus the whale was peeled much as one would peel a roll of bologna sausage. When the great carcass had been rolled completely over, the blanket piece of blubber came off. The upper end of it fast to the tackle hook was up almost against the cross-trees as the lower end swung free. The largest blanket pieces weighed perhaps ten tons. Six were taken off in the process of skinning. The weight of the whale, I should estimate, was roughly something like one hundred tons, perhaps a little more.
When the blanket piece was cut free from the whale it swung inboard, and as it came over the main hatch, it was lowered into the hold. There men fell upon it with short spades, cutting it into small pieces and distributing them equally about the ship to prevent the vessel from listing. It took most of the day to strip the whale of its blubber. When this had been finished the great flensed carcass stretched out along the ship's side a mass of blood-red flesh. The final work was cutting in the "old head."
Long John with an axe climbed down uponthe whale's back. As it was his boat that had struck the whale the cutting in of the head was his job. Nobody envied him the task. The stripped body of a whale offers a surface as slippery as ice. As the waves rocked the whale, Long John had much ado to keep his footing. Once he fell and almost tumbled into the water. Finally he cut himself two foot-holds and began to wield his axe, raining blows upon the neck. He chopped through from the upper neck surface into the corners of the mouth, thus loosening the head and upper jaw from the body. The lower jaw is devoid of teeth. The tackle hook having been fixed in the tip-top of the head's bowlike curve, the windlass men heaved away. Up rose the head above the bulwarks and swung inwards.
"Lower, lower away!" cried the mate.
Down came the head upon the deck and a great cheer went up. The "old head" was safe. Immediately afterwards, the mate came forward with a bottle of Jamaica rum and gave each man a swig. "Bringing in his old head," as it is called, is a memorable event in cutting in awhale, and is always celebrated by dealing out a drink all around.
Great hunks of meat were cut out from the carcass. These were hung over the bow. The meat was served in the form of steaks and sausages in both forecastle and cabin. And let me give my testimony right here that whale steak is mighty good eating. It tastes something like tender beef, though it is coarser grained and of ranker flavor. We preferred to eat it as steaks, though made into meat balls with gravy it was extremely toothsome. I do not know how whale would taste if served on the home table, but at sea, after months of salt horse and "sow belly," it was delicious. The hunks became coated with ice over the bow and kept well. They lasted us for several weeks.
When the carcass was cut adrift it went floating astern. Flocks of gulls and sea birds that had been constantly hovering about the ship in hundreds waiting for the feast swooped down upon it. The body washed slowly out of sight, still swarmed over by the gulls.
The head rested in the waist near the poop.It was, I should say, twelve feet high at the crest of the bow, and suggested some strange sort of tent. I stepped inside it without bending my head and walked about in it. Its sides were shaggy with the long hair hanging from the teeth or baleen, and the interior resembled, in a way, a hunter's forest lodge made of pine boughs. If the head had been in a forest instead of on the deck of a ship it would have formed an ideal shelter for a winter's night with a wood fire burning at the opening.
Only the lower tip of the head or what we might call the nose rested on the deck. It was supported otherwise upon the teeth. I now had my first opportunity to see baleen in its natural setting. The teeth viewed from the outside looked something like the interior of a piano. The whale's gums, following the bony skeleton of the jaw, formed an arched and undulant line from nose tip to the back of the jaw. The front teeth were six inches long; the back ones were ten feet. Each tooth, big and little alike, was formed of a thin slab of bluish whalebone, almost flat. The largest of these slabs were sixinches broad at their base in the gum. The smallest were an inch. All tapered to a point. They were set in the gum with the flat surfaces together and almost touching. They were extremely pliant and at the outer ends could be pulled wide apart. The inner edges were hung with black coarse hair, which seemed exactly like that of a horse's tail. The hair on the small front teeth was an inch long perhaps; on the back teeth, it was from six to ten inches long.
Such teeth are beautifully adapted to the animal's feeding habits. The baleen whale feeds on a kind of jelly fish. We saw at times the sea covered with these flat, round, whitish living discs. The whale swims through an area of this food with its mouth open. When it has obtained a mouthful, it closes its jaws. The water is forced out between the slab-like teeth; the jelly fish remain tangled in the hair to be gulped down.
Our first job after the cutting in of the whale was to cut the baleen from the jaw. It was cut away in bunches of ten or a dozen slabs held together by the gums and stowed away in the hold not to be touched again until later in the voyage.
"Trying Out"
"Trying Out"
While the baleen was being prepared for stowage, the lid was removed from the try-works, uncovering the two big copper caldrons. A fire was started in the furnace with kindling and a handful of coal, but kept going thereafter with tried-out blubber called "scrap." Two men dressed in oil-skins were sent down into the blubber-room as the portion of the hold was called in which the blanket pieces of blubber had been stowed. Their oil-skins were to protect them from the oil which oozed from the blubber. Oilskins, however, are but slight protection as I learned later when I was sent into the blubber room at the taking of another whale. The oil soaks through the water-proof oil-skins and saturates one's clothes and goes clear through to the skin leaving it as greasy as if it had been rubbed with oil.
A whale's blubber lies immediately beneath its skin, which is black and rubbery and about a quarter of an inch thick. The blubber is packed between this thin covering and the flesh in a layerof pink and opalescent fat from six inches to two feet thick. The blubber is so full of oil that the oil exudes from it. One can squeeze the oil from a piece of raw blubber as water from a sponge.
The two blubber-room men with short handled spades cut the great blankets of blubber in what in whaling parlance are called "horse pieces." These horse pieces are two or three feet long and about six inches wide. They are pitched into tubs on deck and the tubs dragged forward to the mincing vat. This is an immense oblong tub across the top of which is fastened a plank. Two sailors with mincing knives are stationed at each end of the plank. The mincing knife is like a carpenter's drawing knife, except that the edge is on the outside. The sailor lays a horse piece along the plank. Then grasping the mincing knife by its two handles, he passes the blade back and forth from side to side across the blubber until it has been cut into leaves something like those of a book, each leaf perhaps a quarter of an inch thick and all of them held together at the back by the black skin. Thus minced the horse pieces are pitch-forked intothe caldrons that are kept bubbling with boiling oil. When the oil has been boiled out of them, the horse-pieces, now shrunken and twisted into hard, brittle lumps, called "scrap," are skimmed off and thrown into a vat at the port side of the try-works to be used later as fuel in trying out the remainder of the blubber. The oil is ladled off into a cooling vat at the starboard side where, after it has cooled, it is siphoned into hogsheads or tanks and these are later stowed in the hold.
The trying out of the whale gave several delicacies to the forecastle menu. Hardtack biscuit soaked in buckets of sea water and then boiled in the bubbling caldrons of oil made relishing morsels. The crisp, tried-out blubber, which looked like honey-comb, was palatable to some. Black whale skin freed of blubber and cut into small cubes and pickled in salt and vinegar had a rather agreeable taste, though it was much like eating pickled rubber. These things with whale steaks and whale sausages made trying-out days a season of continual feasting.
At night "scrap" was put into an iron basket swung between the two chimneys of the try-worksand set on fire, making a flaring yellow blaze which lighted the ship from stem to stern and threw weird shadows everywhere. The beacon not only gave us plenty of light to work by, but advertised the brig's good luck to any ship which happened in sight of us. In the blubber-room, holes were cut in a blanket piece and rope yarns, having been rubbed upon the blubber, were coiled in the hole and lighted. As they burned they lighted the oil from the blubber. These unique lamps had all the oil in a ten-ton blanket piece to draw on. It was only the wick that ever gave out. New strands of rope yarn had to be provided from time to time. Three or four of these lamps blazing and spluttering made the blubber-room bright.
Working night and day, it took three days to cut in and try out the whale. While the work was going on, the decks were so greasy that we could run and slide anywhere for long distances like boys on ice. After the whale had been tried out and the oil casks had been stowed below, we fell upon the decks and paint work with lye and water. Hard work soon had the ship looking as bright as a new pin.
SHAKING HANDS WITH SIBERIA
The ship's prow was turned northward after work on the whale had been finished. I expected we would soon run into the ice again. We sailed on and on, but not a block of ice big enough to make a highball did we sight. The white floes and drifts and the frozen continent floating southward, along the coasts of which we had cruised for whales and which had surrounded us and held us captive for three weeks, had disappeared entirely. The warm water from the south, the southern winds, and the spring sunshine had melted the ice. Its utter disappearance savored of magic.
A long hilly coast rose ahead of us covered with grass, barren of trees or shrubs, dotted with blackened skeletons of old ice—an utterly desolate land. It was Siberia. We put into a bightcalled St. Lawrence Bay. There was an Eskimo village on the shore. The huts were made of whale ribs covered with hides of walrus and reindeer. In the warm weather, some of the hides had been removed and we saw the white gleaming bones of the frame work. We could see the dogs with tails curling over their backs frisking about and could hear their clamor as they bayed the great white-winged thing that had come up from over the sea's verge.
In this first part of July it was continuous day. The sun set at eleven o'clock at night in the northwest. Its disc remained barely below the horizon—we could almost see its flaming rim. A molten glow of color made the sky resplendent just above it as it passed across the north pole. It rose at 1:30 in the morning high in the northeast. All the time it was down a brilliant twilight prevailed—a twilight like that which in our temperate zone immediately follows the sinking of the sun behind a hill. We could see to read without difficulty.
Soon boats and kyacks were putting off from the village. When we were still a mile or twoout, strange craft came alongside and Eskimo men, women, and children swarmed aboard. Very picturesque they looked in clothes made of the skins of reindeer, hair seals, dogs, and squirrels, oddly trimmed and decorated with fur mosaics in queer designs. Some of the women wore over their furs a yellow water-proof cloak made of the intestines of fish, ornamented with needle-work figures and quite neat looking.
The men and the older women had animal faces of low intelligence. The young girls were extremely pretty, with glossy, coal-black hair, bright black eyes, red cheeks, lips like ripe cherries, and gleaming white teeth forever showing in the laughter of irresponsibility and perfect health.
The captain ordered a bucket of hardtack brought out in honor of our guests. The biscuit were dumped in a pile on the main deck. The Eskimos gathered around in a solemn and dignified circle. The old men divided the bread, giving an equal number of hardtack to each.
This ceremony of welcome over, the Eskimos were given the freedom of the ship, or at least,took it. We kept a careful watch upon them, however, to see that they took nothing else. Several of the Eskimo men had a sufficient smattering of English to make themselves understood. They had picked up their small vocabulary among the whalers which every spring put in at the little ports along the Siberian and Alaskan coasts. One of them had been whaling to the Arctic Ocean aboard a whale ship which some accident had left short handed. He spoke better English than any of the others and was evidently regarded by his fellow townsmen as a wonderfully intellectual person. He became quite friendly with me, showing his friendship by begging me to give him almost everything I had, from tobacco to clothes. He constantly used an Eskimo word the meaning of which all whalers have learned and it assisted him materially in telling his stories—he was a great story teller. This word was "pau,"—it means "nothing." I never knew before how important nothing could be in human language. Here is a sample of his use of "nothing:"