Chapter XIIIIn Which Tom Anderly Relates A Story That Arouses My Interest
Chapter XIII
In Which Tom Anderly Relates A Story That Arouses My Interest
Captain Rogers was not a harsh man, but he was a stern disciplinarian. That he could not change the course of his ship to land me in some port, or to put me aboard a homeward bound vessel, is not to be wondered at. He had both his owners and his crew to think of. I was thankful, when I saw the week’s weather that followed my boarding the Scarboro, that I had been saved from further battling with the elements in the sloop.
Ben Gibson advised me to write fully of my situation and prospects and have the letter, or letters, ready to put aboard any mail-carrying ship we might meet. A steamship bound for the Cape of Good Hope, even, would get a letter to Bolderhead, via London, before I could get back myself from any South American port that the Scarboro might be obliged to touch at.
I knew, however, that the whaling barkwas not likely to touch at any port unless she suffered seriously from the gales. Whaling skippers are not likely to trust their crews in port, for the possible three year term of shipment stretches out into an unendurable vista in the mind of the imprisoned sailor.
For that is what a sailor is—a prisoner. As the great Samuel Johnson declared, a sailor is worse off than a man in jail, for the sailor is not only a prisoner, but he is in danger all of the time! However, the prospect of the danger and hardship of the seafarer’s life had never troubled me. I must admit that I was delighted to turn to with the captain’s watch (that was Ben Gibson’s watch) and take up the duties of a foremast hand upon the Scarboro. I wrote the letters as I was advised. I wrote to my mother, of course, to Ham Mayberry, and last of all, and more particularly, to Lawyer Hounsditch.
To the latter gentleman I explained all I feared regarding Mr. Chester Downes and his machinations. To Ham I told the particulars of my having been swept out to sea and instructed him to find my mooring rope and save it, with its cut end for evidence; and if possible to learn who had helped Paul Downes, my cousin, cut me adrift and nail me in thecabin of theWavecrest. To my mother I wrote cheerfully and asked her to have money sent me at Buenos Ayres, as that might be a port the Scarboro would touch at, or a port I could reach if I left the whaleship.
I cannot say that I was continually worried by my state aboard the whaler. What boy would not have delighted in being thus thrust into the midst of the very life and work he had so longed to follow? I could not but feel that it wasmeantfor me to be a sailor, after all.
The Webbs had been seafaring folk, time out of mind. My father’s father had tried to keep his own son off the water by giving him a college education and making a doctor of him. But the moment my father was sure of his sheepskin, he had looked about for a chance to go as surgeon on a deep water ship, and had gone voyage after voyage until his marriage.
Inside of a fortnight Captain Rogers had complimented me on my work and manner, and Mr. Robbins, the mate, said I was worth my salt-horse and hardbread. Of course while on duty Ben Gibson, the young second mate, and I must of necessity hold to “quarterdeck etiquette;” he was “Mr. Gibson”and I was “Webb.” We were punctilious indeed about these niceties of address. Off duty, however, we were two boys together, and rather inclined to sky-lark.
The other close friend that I made aboard the Scarboro during the first few days of the voyage, was old Tom Anderly. He was the bewhiskered old barnacle who had welcomed the possibility of getting oil in the bark’s tanks from the dead whale, when I had first come aboard.
Anderly was a boat-steerer, an old sea dog who had sailed oft and again with the skipper, and who had lanced more whales than any other half dozen men aboard. Being in old Tom’s watch I grew soon familiar with him; and from the beginning I saw that the old seaman took more than a common interest in me.
The old man was full of stories of whale fishing and other experiences at sea. But it was not his fund of information, or his tales, that first of all interested me in Tom Anderly. I had told nobody—not even Ben Gibson—about the actual event of my being swept out to sea from Bolderhead, nor had I said a word about my father. The fact that he had been a sea-going physician would not help mehold my own with the crew of the Scarboro. At sea, according to the homely old saw, “every tub must stand on its own bottom.”
“So you come from Bolderhead, do you?” quoth Tom to me, one day when we were lounging together forward of the capstan, and he was mending his pipe.
“That’s where we live in the summer,” I admitted.
“Jest summer visitors, are ye?”
“Well, my mother has a house there.”
“Yes. Ye ain’t a native, though, eh?” and before I could reply to this, he continued: “I been studying about Bolderhead ever since you come aboard. There was something curious happened at Bolderhead—or just off the inlet—and it’s all come back to me now.”
“What was it?” I asked, idly.
“Well, it’s quite a yarn,” he said, wagging his head. “I was running in the old hooker, Sally Smith, from Portland to New York. She carted stone. There warn’t but five of us aboard, includin’ the cap’n and the cook. But our freight warn’t perishable,” and he chuckled, “so speed didn’t enter into our calculations. One day there come up a smother of fog as we was just off Bolderhead Neck. We’d run some in-shore. It fell adead calm—one o’ them still, creepy times when you can hear sheep bells and dinner horns for miles and miles.
“Well, sir! we lay there in this smother of fog and all of a suddent we heard somebody hootin’. Cap he halloaed back. ‘Blow yer scare!’ sings out the same faint voice. ‘Keep it blowin’.’
“‘There’s somebody out yon tryin’ to make the Sally,’ says the Cap’n. I stepped on the tread of the siren and kept her blattin’ now and then and, after some minutes, we heard a splashin’ alongside and there was a man swimming in the sea.”
“He had swum out from shore?” I asked, just to keep the conversation going. I wasn’t really interested.
“No. His boat had begun leaking badly. It was too heavy to turn over, and before it sank he slipped into the sea and made for us. He had seen us before the fog shut down, and knew that we were becalmed. He’d just tied his shoes about his neck by the lacings and swum out with every rag of clothes on him—’cept his hat.”
“And why did he swim for your craft instead of to shore?”
“Said he was nearer the Sally when hisboat took in so much water. And the tidewasrunning out, no doubt. But it always did seem queer to me,” continued Tom.
“What was queer?” I asked the question without the slightest eagerness—indeed, I really was not interested much in what the old sailor was saying.
“Queer that such a smart-appearin’, intelligent gent should have got himself in such a fix.”
“As how?”
“To set sail in such a leaky old tub.”
“Oh!”
“And then, when he found she was sinking under him not to make for the shore.”
“What became of him?” I asked.
“He went to New York with us. There he stepped ashore and I ain’t never seen him since—and only heard of him once, an’ that was ten years or so afterward——”
“Hullo!” I cried, suddenly waking up. “When did all this happen, Tom?”
“When did what happen?”
“This man swimming aboard your schooner?”
“Why, nigh as I can remember, it must be fourteen or fifteen years ago—come next spring. It was in April, after the weatherwas right smart warm. Otherwise he wouldn’t have swum so far, I bet ye!”
My voice, I knew, had suddenly become husky. I was startled, though I don’t know why I should have felt so strangely as I reviewed this tale he had told.
“What was his name, Tom?” I asked.
“The name of the feller I was tellin’ you of?”
“Yes.”
“Carver.”
“How d’you know it was?”
“Why, he said so!” exclaimed Tom. “A man ought to know his own name, oughtn’t he?”
“He should—yes.”
“Well!”
“But did he have any way of proving his name to be Carver?”
“Pshaw! the Cap’n never axed him to prove it. Why for should he lie about it? He worked his way to New York and all he got was his grub for it. I let him have an old pilot coat of mine, he having only a thin jacket on him. He agreed to pay me two dollars for it. And he was jest as honest as they make ’em.”
“He paid you?”
“He sartinly did,” said old Tom, wagging his head. “A feller who would be as good as his word in that particular wouldn’t lie about his name, would he?”
“You said you heard from him ten years after?” I asked, without trying to answer Tom’s query.
“Well—yes—it was ten years. But I guess the letter had been lying there in the office of Radnor & Blunt—them’s the folks we dealt with on the Sally Smith—for a long time. I had left the Sally the year after and only just by chance went into the office when I was in New York. The chief clerk he passed me over a letter. In it was a two-dollar bill and a line saying it was for the coat.”
“And it had been there waiting for you for some time?”
“’Twas as yellow as saffron. They didn’t know where I lived when I was to home. And I had been ’round the world in the Scarboro, too.”
“And the letter was from Bolderhead?” I asked, slowly.
“No. That was the funny part of it,” said Tom.
I awoke again and once more felt a thrill of excitement in my veins. I watched the old fellow jealously.
“Didn’t the man—this Carver—belong in Bolderhead?”
“So I supposed. But the letter come from foreign parts.”
“Where?” I asked.
“’Twas from Santiago, Chili.”
“Then he had not gone back to Bolderhead?” I stammered.
“Bless ye, lad! how do I know? I only know he sent the money from Chili. He was something of a mystery, that feller, I allow. Ever heard tell of him in Bolderhead? Are there any Carvers there?”
“It’s a mighty small town along the New England coast in which there are no Carvers,” I replied.
“Now, ain’t that a fact? They’re a spraddled out family, I do allow,” said Tom.
“What did this man look like?” I asked, and I was still eager—I could scarcely have told why.
There was an enlarged crayon picture of my father in my bedroom at home. When he died my mother only had a cheap little tintype of him. I don’t suppose the crayon portrait looked much like Dr. Webb. Certainly there was little in Tom Anderly’s description to connect the strange man rescued out of thesea with the portrait of my father. Yet the circumstances, the time of the happening, and the suspicions that had been roused in my mind by Paul Downes and his father, all dovetailed together and troubled me.
Even Ham Mayberry, who scoffed at the idea that my father had made way with himself, admitted that had Dr. Webb lived my mother and I could never have enjoyed Grandfather Darringford’s money. I could never believe that my father had been wicked enough to commit suicide. But, suppose he had merely slipped away from us—gone out of our lives entirely—with the intention of putting his wife and child in a prosperous position?
It was romantic, I suppose. To the perfectly sane and hard-headed such a suspicion would seem utterly ridiculous. But the longer I thought over Tom Anderly’s story—the more I allowed my imagination to roam—the more possible the idea seemed. Ham had said my father was not a money-making man. He was in financial difficulties, too. Grandfather had died and there was a heap of money just beyond my mother’s grasp. My father had become a stumbling-block in her path—in my path. He it was who kept us from enjoying wealth.
The cruelty of my grandfather in arranging such a situation filled me with anger when I contemplated it. What could my father think but that, if he were out of the way, it would be far, far better for his wife and child?
I could not believe, for an instant, that Dr. Webb would have committed the crime of self-destruction. But in my then romantic state of mind, what more easily believed than that he had deliberately removed himself out of our lives—and in a way to make it appear that he was dead?
As we did, he knew we would at once enter into the enjoyment of the wealth left by old Mr. Darringford. There would be no material suffering caused by his dropping out of sight. I faced the matter with more coolness and a better understanding than most boys of my age possess, because of my knowing my mother’s nature so well. Take my own sudden disappearance, for instance. I knew well she would be quite overwhelmed at first; but if good Dr. Eldridge brought her out of it all right, and she had somebody to turn to and depend upon for comfort and encouragement, she would sustain my mysterious absence very well indeed.
And my father must have known her charactermuch better than I did! Undoubtedly it had been very hard for mother to endure the cramped circumstances of those first two years of her married life. It must have been a great deal harder for Dr. Webb to bear it, knowing that she suffered for lack of the luxuries and ease to which she had been used.
I could imagine that the situation when my grandfather died and left his peculiar will, would have pretty near maddened Dr. Webb. It would not be strange if he contemplated self-destruction as a means of putting my mother and myself positively beyond the reach of poverty. He had rowed out to White Rock. He had left the old watch—I had the heirloom in my pocket now—for the boy who was yet to grow up and bear his name. The fog and the Sally Smith had appeared together and offered him means of escape.
It would be fifteen years the coming spring that my father had disappeared. Tom Anderly had hit the time near enough. Had there been any man named Carver who had suffered such an accident off Bolderhead Neck as the old seaman told of, I would have heard the particulars, knocking about among the Bolderhead docks as I had for years.
The story seemed conclusive. I had never for a moment believed that my father had wickedly made way with himself. But that he was alive—that he had gone out into the world, possibly with the hope of finding a fortune and sometime coming back to mother and me with a pocketful of money—Yes! I could believe that, and Ididbelieve it with all my heart!
Chapter XIVIn Which I Hear for the First Time the Whaler’s Battle-Cry
Chapter XIV
In Which I Hear for the First Time the Whaler’s Battle-Cry
So impressed was I by the imaginings suggested by Tom Anderly’s story, that I opened my letter to old Ham Mayberry and asked him if he had ever heard of a man named Carver who had gone through the experiences Tom had related of the man who had swum to the Sally Smith from the direction of Bolderhead Neck?
It was the very next day, and a fortnight after I had boarded the whaling bark, that I got a chance to send off the letters. The wind lulled and we crossed the course of a steamship hailing from Baltimore and touching on the West Coast of Africa; Captain Rogers sent the letters aboard the steamship. There was no use in my trying to get passage on her, however; I would have gained nothing by such a move.
“Now your letters will be picked up by a London, or Lisbon-bound steamer and itwon’t be two months before your folks will know all about you,” Ben Gibson said. “If you’d had to depend upon the post-box in the Straits of Magellan, for instance, it might be six months before Bolderhead folk would ever know what had become of you.”
I must confess that every day I was becoming more and more enamored of this life at sea. We had had little fair weather and were kept busy making sail and then reefing again, or repairing the small damages made by the gale. Captain Rogers was not the man to lay hove to in any fair breeze. We outran the bad weather before we crossed the line and then the lookout went to the masthead and from that time on, as long as I was with the Scarboro, the crowsnest was never empty by day.
For we had come into those regions of the South Atlantic where schools of the big mammals for which we hunted might be at any time come upon, especially at this season of the year. The gale having left us, the weather was charming. While winter was threatening New England we were in the latitude of perpetual summer, and as long as the trade wind blew we did not suffer from the heat.
The Scarboro carried crew enough to put out six boats at a time and still leave a boatkeeper and cook aboard. As a usual thing, however, only four boats were expected to be out at once—the captain’s, Ben Gibson’s (with whom Tom Anderly went as boat-steerer and would really be in charge until Ben learned the ropes) the mate’s boat, and Bill Rudd, the carpenter’s, boat. The gun forward in the Scarboro’s bows, however, was there for a purpose, too, as I found out on the first day we sighted a whale.
The man in the crowsnest suddenly hailed the deck, when Mr. Gibson was in charge:
“On deck, sir!” he sang out, with such eagerness that the watch came instantly to attention.
“Well, sir?” cried Ben.
“Ah-h blows! Again, sir!”
“Pass the word for Cap’n Rogers, Webb,” the second mate said to me, and grabbing his glasses he started up the backstays to see the sight. Some of the hands sprang into the rigging, too, and soon the whaler’s battle-cry rang through the ship:
“Ah-h blows! And spouts!”
Captain Rogers was on deck in a moment. He ran up after Ben Gibson and took anearnest peek through the glasses himself. Then he dropped down to the quarter and said, but with satisfaction:
“Only one fish in sight. May be more ahead. Perhaps it’s a she with a calf and has got behind the school. We’ll see. Now, boys! tumble up and let’s get the rags on her.”
We went at the sails with a will and for the first time I saw every yard of canvas the Scarboro could set flung to the breeze. The old bark began to hustle. She was heavy and she could do no fancy sailing; but having the wind with her she rushed down upon the lone whale like a steamship. Soon we could see the undulating black hump of the whale from the deck.
We saw an occasional spurt of water, or mist, from its blow-holes. By and by it breached and was out of sight for a short time. When it came up again it was still tail-end to the Scarboro and not half a mile away. There was no other whale in sight; but this was a big fellow—a right whale, or baleener. After coming up it lay quietly on the water, or moving ahead very slowly.
The men were eager to get after it in the boats; but Captain Rogers knew a better way than that to attack a lone whale. Wereefed down again and left little canvas exposed while the Scarboro kept on her tack under the momentum she had already gathered. The captain went forward where the gun had been made ready. He swung it about on its pivot and got the range of the whale.
At this small distance the huge mammal looked like a cigar-shaped piece of smooth, shiny slate-colored India-rubber—no longer black. Four or five feet of its diameter and forty feet or more of its length showed like a mound in the smooth water, and the body alternately rose and dipped as the whale swam slowly along. It was doubtless feeding on the tiny marine creatures which are the sole food of the right whale. It took great “gulps” of sea water into its cavernous mouth, water which it strained out through its curtain of baleen, swallowing only the tiny fish down a gullet so small that it would not admit a man’s fist.
The Scarboro was approaching it from behind and at an angle, so that its course and ours made the sides of a V. Captain Rogers followed the course of the whale alertly, swinging the muzzle of the cannon with skill. Most of the crew were grouped behind him in anxious expectancy.
Suddenly I felt a touch upon my arm. It was Tom Anderly. He was pointing silently over the port bow. There, a couple of miles away, I judged, several columns of mist were spouting into the air.There was the school!
But I turned to view the nearby mammoth again just as the gun spoke. I saw a hideous, crimson zigzag gash on the broad side of the whale, I heard the rumbling roar of the time-bomb at the point of the harpoon exploding in the whale’s vitals.
Instantly the whole crew were in a pandemonium of excitement; but the captain’s shrill orders were obeyed like clockwork. I felt the blow of the great bark give a convulsive jerk. The whale had gone straight downward and the cable attached to the harpoon shot over the bow so fast that the eye could not follow its course. Where the hemp touched the rail a column of smoke arose. Two men sprang with buckets to dip up the sea-water and pour it upon the shrieking line. The windlass spun around like a boy’s top.
Coil after coil of the rope leaped into nothingness. Had there been a big express locomotive hitched to that line, and going at full speed, I do not think the line would have paid out any faster!
At last the windlass ceased to spin. The whale had either touched bottom, or had descended as far as it could. We had already laid our mainsail aback and as the line lay slack upon the water, Captain Rogers motioned to the men at the windlass to wind in. It was like playing a fish at the end of a line and reel.
Those next few moments were breathless ones for all hands. Suddenly the sea parted right off the port bow, and not half a cable’s length ahead. Up, and up the gigantic creature rose—up, up, up till it towered fifteen feet above the Scarboro’s rail!
Then it turned a somersault, beating the sea to waves like the boiling of a cauldron. It rose again, churning the sea with its tail, and then raising the caudal fin for twenty feet, or more, and slapping it down upon the water with a shock like the report of a big gun—aye, like a thunder-clap!
Then the great beast whirled round and round—it seemed seeking for the thing that had so hurt it. We watched the struggle of the leviathan with pop-eyed expectation—especially the young second mate and myself, for we were the only real greenhorns aboard the Scarboro. The whale wrapped severallengths of the line about its body and then shot away into the southwest, away from the distant school. It swam so fast that it actually seemed to skip from wave to wave like a swallow.
When it reached the end of the slack there was a jerk that shook the bark from stem to stern. Then came the tug of war. There was no small whaleboat behind it, but a great, 195 ton bark, and this massive bulk the creature actually towed like a steam-tug towing a steamship.
The captain let more line out. Far out at the end of two miles of line the whale lashed about, and churned the sea, and blew blasts of vapor into the air. Then old Tom Anderly cried that it was spouting blood and we knew the end was near.
But the captain gave the whale half an hour in which to die before ordering the line wound inboard. The rest of the school had gone on steadily into the south and was still several miles away. We could not launch our boats for them, but gave our complete attention to the first kill.
As the whale felt the pull of the line it gave a single convulsive jump. But after waiting a moment or two, Captain Rogerscommanded the windlass to be manned again. Slowly the line came in and, after a time, the huge, inert, flabby body floated, belly up, just off our bows.
The mate’s boat was lowered and a chain was passed around the whale’s body just forward of the tail. With this it was grappled to the Scarboro’s side. I could see a dozen quarreling porpoises eating the tongue of the monster that had been, two hours before, alive and, to these scavengers, invincible.
There was a broad smile on every man’s face, from Captain Rogers down the line. The first kill had been successful. Oil was in sight. But—as I soon found out—the real work of the voyage had begun as well.
Chapter XVIn Which We “Strike On”
Chapter XV
In Which We “Strike On”
Belly uppermost the huge whale (its actual length was seventy-three feet) was fastened “stem and stern” along the starboard side of the Scarboro. The first operation of butchering a whale—if it be a baleener—is to secure the whalebone. This is a difficult job as I very soon saw. The thick, hard, horny substance must be separated from the jaw; and it sometimes turns the edge of the axe like iron would.
When we had got the baleen inboard, however, the more disagreeable work of “flensing” began. A number of the men, with old Tom Anderly at their head, got upon the whale in spiked shoes and with blubber spades attacked the main carcass of the beast. The blubber was cut up into squares, weighing a ton or more each, the hook of the falls caught in one end, and then the blubber was “eased off” with the spades while those aboard hauled on the tackle, thus ripping the blubber from the layer of flesh beneath.
In handling a small whale, Tom told me, they would thus rip the blubber off in long strips, rolling the carcass over and over in the bights of the holding chains. For this one whale Captain Rogers did not see fit to start the fire under the donkey-engine amid ships, by which the blubber could have been raised inboard much easier.
The try-out caldrons were heated, however, and the blubber as it came inboard—like “sides” from a great hog—was hacked into pieces of two or three pounds each and thrown into the pots. Soon the deck of the bark, from bow to stern, was slippery with spilled oil, or bits of blubber. A thick, greasy smoke rolled away from the ship. It’s flavor in the mouth was at first sickening. We got used to it.
“Hi, lad!” cried Tom Anderly, when I looked over the rail, “now you’ve got a taste of real whaler’s souse—everything you put in your potato-trap for the rest of the v’y’ge will be flavored with whale-oil.”
A whale will weigh about as many tons as it is feet long—in other words, this seventy-three foot whale weighed probably seventy ton and from the blubber we tried out thirty tons of oil—nearly half its weight in the tanks beside the baleen!
We had been sailing in the wake of the big school of whales we had spied when we killed the baleener. We came up with them again at mid-afternoon, and found that they were sperms. That was why theMysticetewe had killed the day before did not start to drag the Scarboro toward the school. The baleeners and theDenticete(toothed whales) do not mix in company, and are, indeed, seldom found in the same seas. The baleeners are usually found toward the Arctic or Antarctic regions, while the sperms and their ilk hold to the warm seas.
Captain Rogers might have run down to the school of cachelots and gunned for one of the beasts; but then the others would have been frightened away. The bark lay to upon a perfectly calm sea, and at a distance of about two miles from the school, and four boats were manned and shot away from the ship. The whales seemed to be asleep, or lying sunning themselves, upon the surface of the sea.
I was in Ben Gibson’s boat, of which old Tom was steersman. He would handle the iron too, for as I have said, Ben was just as green in the actual practice of whalemanship as I was myself. We raced with the otherboats for the nearest prize, which proved to be a husky bull, longer than the baleener we had killed.
I was bow oar, and I found that I could hold my own with the rest of the crew. Our stroke set a slapping pace and we bent to the work as though we were racing for the sport of it. Each crew desired to be first and have the credit of fleshing the iron in this monster. The water being so calm it proved to be a very pretty struggle. And all done so silently! The whale is sharp-eared and on a mill-pond sea like this, sounds carry far. We came up from behind the mammoth, and we were ahead of the other boats.
The captain, in the nearest boat, signaled us with his hand to strike on, while his boat rushed past for another of the sleeping monsters. Old Tom and the young second mate changed places swiftly and the old harpooner stood up poising the heavy iron and looking to see that the coils of the rope were free. With a nod Mr. Gibson ordered the oars brought inboard and he pulled in the long steering oar himself. The whaleboat shot close up to the whale’s side. The body loomed beside us like the rolling hull of an unballasted ship.
With my face over my shoulder I watched old Tom poise the iron. When he swung it back the muscles of his shoulder and upper arm flexed like a pugilist’s! He was a fit subject for a statue at that instant. Then he flung body and weapon forward, the latter left his hand smoothly, and the sabre-sharp point sunk deep in the yielding blubber.
“Back all!” gasped Ben Gibson, scarcely above his breath, so excited was he.
But we had expected the order and were ready for it. The oars went in with unanimity and the boat shot back, for a whaleboat is as sharp at one end as it is at the other.
The whale made no flurry, however. It was as though he lay stunned for half a minute—perhaps longer. Then he made up his mind what to do, and he did it with a promptness and speed that was amazing.
Like a spurred horse the whale started ahead. I declare, it seemed as though half his length came out of the sea at the first jump. The line whizzed over the bow as though it were tackled to a fast express.
“Pull!” yelled Ben and we laid to the oars so that when the line ran out the shock would not be so great. When the first line was all out and Tom bent on another we were rushing through the water like mad. We passedthe captain’s boat just after he had struck on himself and his kill had sounded.
“Go it, young man!” yelled Captain Rogers, standing up and waving his hat to his nephew, “you’re going out of town faster than you’ll come back.”
All we could do in that double-ended boat was to sit still and hold tight. I candidly believe that we traveled at a speed of a mile minute. I had once been aboard of a turbine launch, and the black water was thrown up on either side of that whaleboat in a wave just as it had flowed away from the nose of the launch!
This wave seemed to be three feet higher than the gunwale of the boat and as black as ebony. Even Tom Anderly cast a glance at the boat-hatchet as though he contemplated cutting the taut line. Our eyes were blinded by the wind which seemed to be blowing a hurricane. Actually there was scarcely a breath stirring over the surface of the placid ocean.
Our locomotive went directly through the school. Its mates rolled placidly and eyed us as we shot by with wicked glance. But none of them followed the boat which continued to tear through the water with undiminished speed.
But after a time we found that we had company, and mighty unpleasant company, too. In the boiling wake of the whaleboat I could see a dozen triangular fins—the fins of the real tiger shark of the tropics. Not a nice spectacle to men in such a situation as ours. Secretly I was frightened, and I reckon even the oldest in the boat’s crew felt serious.
The mad whale was taking us farther and farther away from the bark and our friends. Indeed, the Scarboro was wiped out of sight, it seemed, within a very few minutes, and the other three boats were lost behind us, too.
The runaway, however, did not continue straight ahead. Its speed did not seem to slacken in the least; but soon it began to circle around, finding itself without its mates.
“If the old feller don’t put on brakes pretty soon the harpoon’ll git so hot it’ll melt the blubber and pull out,” chuckled the stroke-oar.
It was the first word spoken that showed relief. There was a perceptible slackening of our speed. And the whale was “going back to town,” as the captain had intimated.
“Get hold of that line, Webb, and stand ready to haul,” said Mr. Gibson to me, taking the heavy whalegun from its covered beckets,after changing places again with old Tom.
“Now for it!” muttered the boat-steerer, gripping the eighteen-foot oar and craning forward eagerly. He was just as excited as the rest of us. I hauled in on the line, standing firmly braced just behind the young second mate. The whale had actually come to a stop and did not sound. We drew closer and closer.
“Jest a leetle be-aft the for’ard fin, sir!” whispered old Tom, excitedly.
Gibson grunted some reply and raised the gun, taking careful aim at the mountain of flesh about which the water swirled. A second or two of breathless suspense followed as, oars in hand, we waited the report of the gun.
A sharp report made me jump. Then came the dull explosion of the bomb-lance somewhere in the vitals of the whale.
“Stern all! stern all!” shouted Mr. Gibson, this time finding his voice.
The wounded whale flung itself completely out of the water. For a moment we could see daylight underneath the huge bulk and as we backed water with all our strength it did seem as though that convulsed, eighty barrel sperm must fall upon the boat and overwhelm it!
Chapter XVIIn Which There Is Some Information and Much Excitement
Chapter XVI
In Which There Is Some Information and Much Excitement
The young second officer’s command needed no repetition. There was no temptation for us to linger under the monster. With a crash that seemed to make sea and air tremble, the great body struck the surface of the water.
The whaleboat dashed back just in time, and then rocked upon the waves as the dying whale rolled to and fro in his “flurry.” Then, with a great puff, the creature rolled partially on his side, and the ocean thereabout became tinged with the blood thrown out of its blow-hole.
“Killed with one lance! killed with one lance!” yelled Second Mate Gibson.
But then he gripped his dignity again and sat down, giving commands in his ordinary tone. Old Tom stood up to glance about the sea-scape: “And now where’s that thundering old hooker?” he demanded. “We’ll have a fine time pulling this baby to her.”
But that is what we had to do. We had had our “fun;” now we settled down to doggedly pulling the heavy oars, being divided into two watches, and saw the light of the Scarboro’s trying-out works at midnight! The Captain and Mr. Rudd had both got small whales and one had been laid aboard each side of the bark. The crew were working like gnomes in a pantomime when we rowed sadly to the bark with our huge tow. How we worked! I never had been so tired in my life, and at the end of the second day when the oil from the three whales had been run into the tanks and the decks cleared up again, I could have fallen into my hammock and slept the clock around. But one never catches up one’s sleep on a successful whaler, and the Scarboro certainly was proving good her name as a “lucky” craft.
Between Tom Anderly and Ben Gibson I learned a lot about whaling statistics—famous voyages, wonderful accidents to whaling crews “lucky strikes,” and the like. And these facts, both curious and exciting, I stowed away in my mind for future reference. Despite the fact that steam vessels and the gun and explosive bullet have almost supplanted the old-fashioned manner of killing whales, theluck and pluck of half a century, or more, ago, counted for enough to offset these new methods.
The most extraordinary good-luck voyage ever made by an American whaler was that of the bark Envoy, belonging to the Brownells of New Bedford. She was built in 1826 and in the year 1847 she returned to her then home port in such a condition that the underwriters refused to insure her for another voyage. But Captain William C. Brownell and Captain W. T. Walker agreed to take a chance in the old hulk and she put to sea from New Bedford under Captain Walker on July 12, 1848. As fitted for sea the Envoy, for repairs, supplies and all, stood the two owners in the sum of $8,000, whereas a vessel that could be insured might have cost from $40,000 to $60,000.
She got around the Horn without falling apart and took on a cargo of oil at Wytootackie which her captain had previously purchased from a wrecked whaler and stored there. This oil she hobbled into Manila with and shipped it to London at a profit of $9,000. From Manila the Envoy went cruising in the North Pacific and in fifty-five days she took 2,800 barrels of whale-oil and 40,000 pounds of baleen. With this she returned to Manilaand shipped the bone and 1,800 barrels of oil to London, the shipment yielding $37,500 net.
Again she went cruising and secured 2,500 barrels of oil and 35,000 pounds of bone, bringing both into San Francisco in 1851, where she disposed of the oil for $73,450 and shipped the bone to her home port where it brought $12,500. To complete the record of her good luck, San Francisco merchants offered $6,000 for the condemned old bark that had, in two years, or thereabout, brought to her owners and venturesome crew the sum of $138,450.
With the captain’s share as one-seventeenth of the “lay” the skipper of the Envoy must have made $8,000. “There were common sailors on that ship that turned up a thousand dollars in pocket when they were paid off,” said Ben Gibson, when we were discussing it. “The second mate, with his one-forty-fifth, cleaned up three thousand. Hope I’ll do half as well in the same length of time with the Scarboro.”
I learned that the largest catch brought into port by an American whaler, as the result of a single cruise, included 5,300 barrels of oil and 200 barrels of sperm, with 50,000 pounds of bone. It was taken in a voyagelasting only 28 months by the South America, of Providence, Captain R. N. Sowle. It sold for $89,000 in 1849, and the cost of ship and outfit was $40,000.
The Pioneer, of New London, Captain Ebenezer Morgan, holds the medal for the largest sum realized from a single voyage. She left her home port on June 4, 1864, for Davis Strait and returned a year and three months later with a cargo of 1,391 barrels of oil and 22,650 pounds of bone, which sold at war-time prices for $150,000. The outfitting of this craft cost $35,000.
“Those are all great tales,” quoth Tom Anderly, when we had marveled over these lucky voyages. “But how about the brig Emeline of New Bedford? She sailed on July 11, 1841 and in twenty-six months she returned home with how much ile d’you suppose?”
Ben and I gave it up. Some enormous sum, we supposed, was realized.
“Yah!” said Tom. “A fat lot. Twenty-six months and ten barrels of ile, and her skipper killed by a whale.”
“Oh, now that you’re on the hard luck tack,” quoth Ben, “there was the Junior, of New Bedford. I’ve heard my uncle tell of her. Out a year and two months and putback to portclean—and the crew plumb disgusted. Could you blame ’em?”
This conversation went on between our watches while the three sperm whales were being butchered. There was a peculiarity about these cachelots that I failed to mention. We butchered them in a different manner than we did the Greenland, or right, whale. The cachelot has no baleen but it furnishes spermaceti. A large, nearly triangular cavity in the right side of the head, called the “case” (sometimes spermaceti is called “case oil”) is lined with a beautiful, silver-like membrane, and covered by a thick layer of muscular fibres. This cavity contains a secretion of an oily fluid which, after the death of the animal, congeals into a granulated yellowish-hued substance. Our whale, the first of the school killed by the second mate’s boat—had in its case a tun, or ten barrels, of spermaceti!
While the trying-out operations were under way we lost, of course, that school of sperms; but we drifted some miles into the south, and as soon as Captain Rogers could get canvas on her, we made a splendid run for two days west of south and so caught up either with that same school, or with another herd of cachelots.
I had thus far seen some of the sport, a good deal of the hard work, and some of the uncertainties of the whaleman’s life; now I came upon a streak of peril the remembrance of which is not likely to be sponged from my mind as long as I possess any memory at all.
It was at daybreak the lookout hailed the deck with “Ah-h blows! And spouts! All about us, sir!”
It was true. We had run into the midst of the school of whales. Captain Rogers being called by Mr. Robbins, took a look around the sea-line, cast a shrewd look at the heavens, went and squinted at the glass, and then ordered the canvas reefed down and all hands to breakfast. The prospect, of both weather and whales, was for a good kill.
The healthy rivalry between the boats was now manifest. Captain Rogers ordered all six out, leaving but two men aboard the bark. They could just manage to steer her under the riding sail. Our boat was off as soon as any and we pulled steadily for the whale we had chosen as our prize. We had brought in the biggest one before and we hoped to do as well on this occasion.
But we couldn’t pick the biggest this time, for as we shot through the rippling waves,aiming for a huge bull that rolled on the surface, up popped a young female, with a calf, right in our course.
“Look out for her!” quoth old Tom Anderly. “She’ll be ugly, sir—with that kid beside her. Better think twice of it, Mr. Gibson.”
“Think we’re going to have the other boats give us the yah-yah because we pass up a fifty-foot she whale, eh?” demanded the young second officer. “Just step forward here, old timer, and see if you can stick your fork into her.”
After all, the mate’s word was law even to the old boat-steerer. They quickly changed places and Tom took up the iron. The calf was playing on the far side of its mother, and so we could easily come up upon the nigh side without being observed.
In a few moments Tom had her pinned. Then there was the Old Harry to pay and no pitch hot, as the sailors say!
The other two whales I had seen killed merely thought of running away from the thing that had hurt them. But the one we now were fast in had her baby to care for. She set off running, but would not swim faster than the calf could travel. We did not put out the full length of one line.
“Haul in! haul in!” cried Ben Gibson, excitedly. “I’ll get a lance in her.”
“You be careful, sir,” whispered old Tom, from the stern again, to which he had gone after throwing the iron. “There ain’t nothing wickeder than a she whale with a sucking calf, when she’s roused.”
We had drawn in rather close and could see that the calf was falling behind. The mother noticed it as well. She feared the thing that had stung her; but, mother-like, she clung to her little one. She swerved around and the line fell slack.
“Look out, now, sir!” cried Tom Anderly again. “She’s mad, and she’s scared, and she’s looking for us. If she once gits her tail under our bottom its good-bye Jo for all hands—and the water’s mighty wet today.”
Almost as he ceased speaking the wicked eye of the great creature blinked at the boat, and she came rushing down upon it. Tom threw himself upon the great steering oar, while Ben shouted:
“Pull! Pull, you lubbers! Do you want to be swamped by the critter?”
We bent our backs to the struggle and the whaleboat shot ahead; but the maddened cow-whale came on, as big as a brick warehouse, and bent on running us under!