05 Whale Adventure (17 page)

How easy, Roger thought, compared with the back-breaking labour at the oars of a whaleboat! And how swift. And safe. The monster that could smash a whaleboat to bits and kill its crew was no great danger to the men on the deck of this four-hundred-ton, steel-hulled catcher. Modern methods were certainly more efficient, but they had taken much of the adventure out of whaling.

The catcher slid up beside the speeding whale. The gunner swivelled his gun into position.

‘Want to shoot?’ he asked Roger. ‘When I say “Fire”, pull the trigger.’

He sighted the gun carefully, then said: ‘Fire!’

Roger pressed the trigger. The harpoon shot out, trailing a line to which was bound an insulated electric wire carrying the fatal charge. The harpoon sank deep just behind the head.

Without a groan, without a tremor, the whale rolled over on its side, dead.

A line was dropped over the tail flukes. With the seventy-ton monster in tow the catcher ploughed on with scarcely any lessening of its former speed.

Late in the afternoon the factory ship hove in sight. To Roger it looked as big as an aircraft carrier.

‘She’s a whopper!’ he said.

Thirty thousand tons,’ said the gunner who had befriended him.

Roger thought of the three-hundred-ton Killer, a ship that would have been considered large in the whaling days of the past century. This vessel was one hundred times as big.

But not as beautiful. Instead of twenty white sails billowing in the breeze she carried two grimy smokestacks. The curious thing about them was that they were not one. behind the other, as on an ordinary ship, but side by side.

The most amazing thing about this ship was that it seemed to have lost its rear end. It was chopped off square. Where the stern should have been was a great gaping hole, wide enough for two railway trains.

They haul the whale right up into the ship through that hole,’ said the gunner. ‘You’ll see how it works

when they take your whale aboard.’

The gunner’s words, ‘your whale’, gave Roger a thrill. Of course, he had only pulled the trigger - yet it was exciting to think that he had shot one of the greatest animals on earth. It was a mixed feeling. Along with the thrill was the regret that the great and wonderful sea monster had had to be killed.

The factory ship was well named. It sounded like a factory. On the Killer there had been no sound but the talk of the men. Here the voices of men were drowned by the roar of the machinery.

There was the hum of scores of motors, the rattle of chains, the grinding of gears, the clank of arms of iron that did what human arms had once done. Yet it took men, skilled men, to run the machinery. Roger learned from the gunner that the crew of the factory ship was three hundred strong.

They were close enough now to see half a dozen helicopters perched like ladybirds on the ship’s forward deck.

The others are out looking for whales.’ said the gunner. ‘We have a dozen altogether.’

The name painted on the bow of the factory ship was Queen of the South.

‘Why the South?’ asked Roger. This is the tropics.’

‘Yes, but our main business is in the Antarctic You see, there are international rules that govern whaling. Up here we can take only sperms. Down south, during the season, we can take blues and fin-whales and seis and humpbacks and most anything we like. We’re on our way there now. Down there we’ll really get busy. We’ll be at it day and night. Our factory ship alone processes fifteen hundred whales a year. And this is only one of many. The total catch is over thirty thousand whales a year. Some people think whaling is a thing of the past. On the contrary, it’s never been as big as it is today.’

‘What kind of a plane is that?’ asked Roger, pointing to an indistinct white object floating in the cloud of steam above the factory ship.

‘Why, that’s your albatross. He’s adopted us now. He likes the scraps of blubber that get thrown overboard. We often have an albatross hanging around and wouldn’t have paid any attention to this one if it hadn’t been for that red rag tied to his foot. We caught him and found your message.’ ‘Good old Bill!’ said Roger fervently. Catcher 7 snugged up alongside the Queen of the South. The twenty-three castaways were taken aboard. Some could walk, others had to be carried, and all were given comfortable quarters in the depths of the great ship. The ship’s doctor skilfully attended to their needs. Roger, still boiling with curiosity, was soon on deck again. There he found Hal and Mr Scott talking to Captain Ramsay of Queen of the South.

They were gazing down at the cutting-deck. A whale was being dragged in through the great hole in the ship’s stern. A winch groaned as it wound in a steel cable attached to what looked like a gigantic pair of pincers clamped on to the monster’s tail. My whale! thought Roger, but said nothing. ‘That was brought in by our catcher,’ his big brother informed him.

‘You don’t say!’ said Roger in mock surprise. ‘Do tell me all about it.’

Hal was glad to find his young brother so eager to learn. ‘Well, you see, there’s a platform in the bow of the catcher, and a gun on the platform.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Roger, making his eyes round.

“The gun holds a harpoon instead of a bullet It fires the harpoon into the whale. There’s a bomb in the harpoon - it explodes and kills the whale.’

‘Well now, I never!’ said Roger. ‘Gosh, a kid can learn something new every day if he just has a big brother to tell him things.’

Hal looked at him suspiciously. Just at this moment the gunner of Catcher 7 joined them.

‘Well, if it ain’t my young friend,’ he said. ‘That’s your whale right there, boy.’

Hal looked puzzled, ‘What do you mean - how is it his whale?’

‘Why, he shot it, of course.’

Hal stared. ‘You young rascal! What were you up to while I was asleep?’

‘Oh,’ said Roger, ‘I was just learning that you can’t believe all you hear. Like that about bombs and harpoons. That’s old-fashioned. These catchers have electric harpoons. But then | you can’t expect to be hep to what’s new if you spend all your time sleeping below decks.’

Hal swooped to grab his mischievous brother with every intention of paddling his rear end. But he found himself too weak to move fast and the youngster easily evaded him. The gunner and Captain Ramsay were laughing.

‘Yes,’ said the captain, ‘things change pretty fast nowadays. If you want to see speed, watch the way they put through this whale.’

Roger’s whale was already being peeled like a banana. Blubber hooks, operated by machinery, plunged into the hide, took hold, and ripped it off in great strips. Knives attacked the strips and cut them into chunks four feet square. More hooks seized the chunks, dragged them to holes in the deck that looked like oversized manholes, and down went the blubber into cookers below deck.

Suddenly there was a shout, a scream from the winches, and the carcass as big-as a railway carriage was turned over as easily as one would flip a pancake. Then the other side was peeled in the same way.

Another roar of machinery and the skinned carcass was frisked through a tunnel - Hell’s Gate, the captain said it was called because of the rolling steam and deafening noise that came out of it - to the forward deck.

Here there were more machines that sliced off the meat faster than one could carve a turkey. Down went the meat through more holes in the deck. Not just any hole. Each part had a hole of its own, and under each hole was a machine to handle that part of the whale and nothing else.

The liver, weighing a ton, went down to the liver plant. The pituitary gland took a different route, the pancreas another, and so on. Each went down to special pots and special chemists who knew just what to do with them. In five minutes there was nothing left of the whale but the skeleton.

Even that was not to be wasted. Huge power-saws, each fifteen feet long, descended to saw up the great bones and drop the pieces into bone-boilers where the oil would be cooked out of them. What was left would be ground into bonemeal.

It was only half an hour since Roger’s whale had come aboard and now it had completely disappeared. ‘We can process forty-eight whales in twenty-four

hours,’ said the captain. ‘Thirty minutes for each whale. There are ten thousand tons of machinery on this ship. Most of it you can’t see - it’s down below. There are two decks under that whale-deck, both of them full of processing plants and laboratories. Also there’s a freshwater plant. The cookers require a lot of water and it must be fresh. We take in salt water and turn it into fresh at the rate of two thousand tons a day. Want to see the bridge?’

They climbed to the bridge. Here there were more wonders. An automatic pilot kept the ship on course. A radar screen showed everything within forty miles. A fathometer told the depth of water beneath the ship. A local phone made it possible to talk to any man anywhere on the vessel. A radio telephone reached far out, so that the captain could chat with the captain of any one of his catchers or the pilot of any one of his helicopters. Not only that - it was just as easy to talk to the owners in London on the other side of the world.

It was even possible to receive messages from whales. When a whale that had been killed could not be brought in at once it was left afloat and a small radio transmitter was shot into its hide. This gave out continuous signals that were picked up by an instrument on the bridge of the factory ship. Thus the location of the floating whale was known exactly and it could be picked up whenever convenient.

The boys were still studying these marvels when another visitor appeared on the bridge. It was Captain Grindle.

‘I want to see the captain,’ he snapped.

‘You’re talking to him,’ said Captain Ramsay.

‘Sir, I am Captain Grindle, master of the bark Killer. I have come to demand action. If you don’t give it to me at once I’ll report you to the police.’

Captain Ramsay gazed with surprise at the bristling Grindle. One of his catchers had saved this man and his crew from almost certain death. He had supposed that Grindle had come up to thank him. Instead of expressing gratitude Grindle was scolding and threatening. At the very least, he was showing very bad manners. However, Captain Ramsay’s reply was quiet and polite.

‘You have had a very unfortunate experience, Captain Grindle. We are glad to have been of service to you. If there’s anything more we can do for you, you have only to let us know.’

‘I’ll let you know fast enough,’ Grindle rasped. ‘And if you don’t do what I say you’ll suffer for it.’

‘Now, now, my dear captain,’ said Ramsay soothingly. ‘1 know you’ve had a rough time of it and it has upset your nerves. Suppose you just relax and tell me what I can do for you.’

‘Relax, the man says! Relax!’ roared Grindle. ‘I’ll not relax till this thing is set right. My ship was sunk and we had to take to the boats. You know that much. But I’ll bet the skunks didn’t tell you the rest of it. They didn’t tell you that they mutinied. They didn’t tell you that they put me, their captain, in the brig. They didn’t tell you that their carelessness sank the ship. They didn’t tell you that you have a pack of mutineers on board at this very minute.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Captain Ramsay, ‘your second mate has told me the whole story - of course, from his point of vie,w.’

“Then why didn’t you clap them in the brig instead of tucking them in soft beds, feeding them pap, and having

your doctor fussing over them as if they were innocent babes instead of desperate criminals?’

‘In the first place,’ said Captain Ramsay, ‘we have no brig. We don’t need it. In the second place, mutiny on your ship is your responsibility, not mine. Of course I’ll give you any reasonable assistance. I should say that the first thing for you to do is to notify the owners. Who are they?’

‘Kane Whaling Company, St Helena. I’ll send Mr Kane a radiogram - and will I make it a sizzler!’

‘You can do better than send him a message,’ suggested Captain Ramsay. ‘You can talk to him.’

‘Talk! Do you realize St Helena is half-way round the world from here?’

‘Of course.’ Captain Ramsay took up the phone and spoke to his radio operator. ‘Call the radio station on St Helena. Have them connect with Mr Kane of the Kane Whaling Company. Sunset here - it’ll be early morning there. Get him up out of bed if necessary. It’s important.’

In an amazingly short time Grindle found himself talking to his boss. True to his word he told a sizzling story. Some of it was true, most of it was not.

He told of the mutiny. He said nothing of the events that had led up to it - the brutalities, the flogging of the men, the harsh treatment of Roger, the death of the sailmaker dragged at the end of a line until he was taken by a shark.

Hal, listening, was astonished to hear his own name mentioned. He was named the chief conspirator. He, Grindle said, had stirred up the men to mutiny, and he should be the first to hang. Grindle, evidently, had never forgiven Hal for telling him he was unfit to command a ship, for beating him in a fight, and, worst of all, for saving him from the sinking ship. Gratitude being an emotion unknown to him, Grindle nursed a grudge because he had had to be rescued by his enemy.

His story told, he listened to Mr Kane’s instructions. He nodded and grunted and nodded again, and an evil smile spread over his face. When he put down the phone he seemed highly satisfied.

‘My orders are,’ he said, ‘to place all the mutineers under arrest. Special provision for Hunt - he’s to be put

in solitary confinement. First chance I get I’m to take ‘em all back to Honolulu for a hearing before the British Consul.’ He grinned happily and his bristles stood out like black needles. ‘They’re as good as hanged already.’

‘As for arrest,’ said Captain Ramsay, ‘I can’t help you. I can only assure you they won’t escape from this ship. As for transportation, I’ll provide it. As soon as your men are able to travel I’ll put you all aboard one of my catchers and send you to Honolulu. It’s not so far - at fifteen knots you should be there in less than two days. You can radio the Honolulu police and have them meet the ship as she docks and jail your mutineers until the time comes for the hearing. I hope you feel that I am giving you every possible co-operation.’