05 Whale Adventure (4 page)

He looked away, four points on the weather-bow, and saw - nothing. He fixed an icy stare upon Roger.

‘If you got me up here on a fool’s errand -‘

Tm quite sure I saw something, sir.’

But was he sure? He had seen it only out of the corner of his eye. When he had looked straight towards it, it was gone. The breeze had freshened and every once in a while the white crest of a wave would burst into spray. Perhaps this was what he had seen.

The same thought had evidently occurred to the captain. He gazed to starboard for a few minutes, then his patience snapped.

‘White water, that’s what you saw. I’ll teach you to waste my time,’ and he swung a heavy fist at the boy’s head.

Roger ducked just in time to avoid the blow, and the captain’s fist crashed into the mast. He yelped with pain and looked at his bleeding knuckles. Of course, he put the blame on Roger. Muttering curses, he was about to thrash the greenhorn when Jiggs, seeing what was likely to happen, interrupted with a ringing shout: ‘Bl-o-o-o-o-ws!’

The captain and Roger turned to look. There was no mistake about it this time. The boy’s report had been right The jet was four points on the weather-bow and it was the spout of a sperm-whale.

‘All hands on deck!’ roared the captain. The call was repeated by the mate below: ‘All hands on deck! Back the main yard! Stand by to lower!’

At once the ship came alive. There was the sound of heavy sea-boots on the deck as the men ran aft to the boats. The mate kept shouting orders. Again the captain turned upon Roger.

‘Well, what are you doing here? Get down to the boat’.’

Very willingly, Roger left the captain and scrambled down to the deck as fast as his gammy arm would permit. Durkins, the second mate, caught sight of him.

‘You -1 can use you in my boat. Third oar.’

The men leaped into the whaleboats. The lashings were cast off.

‘Lower away!’

The falls raced through the sheaves. Down went the boats. The men bent to the oars. Three light cedar whaleboats, six men in each, streaked away towards the spouting whale.

‘All right, boys,’ shouted the mate, ‘give way now and spring to it. Put some beef in it.’

Roger felt the mate’s eye on him. He could guess what

the mate was thinking. This greenhorn would probably catch a crab - get his oar fouled with the others.

Durkins relaxed when he saw that Roger knew how to handle an oar. The kid kept his eye on the stroke-oar and timed his own stroke with it. What the mate could not guess was how painful this was for Roger with the right arm singing from the blow of the belaying-pin.

The mate stood at the steering-sweep. He could not see the whale, and even the spout was hidden by intervening waves. Yet he knew where to steer. He kept glancing at the ship, which had turned its prow towards the whale.

He knew, too, when the whale was on the surface and when it dived. This information was signalled to him by the captain at the masthead. When the whale broke water the captain ran up a flag; when it ‘went flukes’, plunged beneath the surface, the flag was lowered.

Roger saw his brother in one of the other boats. Hal was pulling lustily. His boat was edging ahead. But Durkins was not to be easily beaten.

‘Pull, boys. Pull like steers. Pull. Pile it on. Long and strong. Pull - every son of you. What’s the matter, kid?’

This last remark was addressed to Roger, who was in such pain that he could no longer pull the fourteen-foot ash oar.

‘My arm,’ said Roger.

‘And I don’t wonder,’ said Durkins, ‘after the rap that pig gave you. Ship your oar.’

Roger took in his oar. He felt like a deserter. With only four oars working the boat steadily lost ground. Both the other boats passed it. Durkins still urged his men on, but it was hopeless. Roger knew how disappointed the second mate must be. Then his eye lit on the mast, which lay across the thwarts. ‘I could put up the sail,’ he suggested. ‘No good,’ said the mate. ‘We’re too close to the wind.’ Roger knew nothing about whaling, but a good deal about sailing. He did not want to argue with the mate. Testing the wind on his face, he felt that the sail would draw enough air to be worth while. They might even be able to overtake the other boats. ‘Please, sir, may I try it?’ he ventured. The mate hesitated. ‘Guess it will do no harm,’ he said, and added rather bitterly: ‘You’re no good to us, anyway. You may as well be doing that as sitting there like a lump on a log.’

Roger lost no time in stepping the mast. Lifting it, he placed it erect in the hole in the forward thwart. The boom dropped. The triangular sail opened and hung like a tired dishcloth. The men muttered in disgust.

Roger hauled in on the sheet-rope. The sail suddenly filled with air and began to pull.

Roger handled the sheet like the rein of a racehorse, drawing a little, giving a little, to suit every changing whim of the breeze. The boat gained speed. Presently it was racing away like a scared cat. It was rapidly overhauling the other boats. ‘The kid’s got something,’ said Durkins. The whale was now in plain sight. Its great black hulk blocked the sky. To Roger it looked as big as the ship. This little twenty-foot boat was only as long as the monster’s lower jaw.

He realized fully for the first time the risk men take who go out in such an eggshell to attack the greatest living creature on the face of the earth. Excitement raced up and down his spine. He had to confess to himself that he was scared. He almost hoped that one of the other boats would get there first.

And that was what happened. The boat in which Hal was pulling shot up alongside the whale a split second before the mate’s. The harpooner standing in the bow hurled his iron. In his hurry to be first he threw at too great a distance and the harpoon fell into the water.

At the same instant the mate’s boat, propelled by both oars and sail, slid into position beside the whale just behind its enormous head. The harpooner was Jim son. Dropping his oar he leaped to his feet in the boat’s bow, raised his harpoon, and plunged it into the black hide.

The monster hardly felt it, for the iron ‘boned’ - that is, instead of penetrating deep into the flesh, it struck a bone, and with such force that the iron was bent. Then it dropped away into the sea.

At once Jimson snatched up his second iron and threw it with all his might. It sank in up to the hitches.

A tremor like an earthquake ran through the giant body.

‘Stern all!’ yelled the mate, and the men lost no time in rowing the boat backward out of reach of the whale’s flukes. At the same time the enormous two-fluked tail, bigger than the screw of any vessel afloat, rose thirty feet into the air and came down again upon the water with a resounding crash not six inches from the gunwale of the boat. The wave made by this gigantic blow washed into the boat and half filled it.

Away went the sea giant, towing the boat behind it. The line from the harpoon to the boat was as taut as a tightrope. The boat was flying through the spray at a good twenty knots. Wave-tops kept tumbling in. The men shipped their oars and bailed for their lives.

A picture of the whole exciting operation was being taken by Mr Scott in the third boat. But it was only a few moments before the whale and the towed boat had disappeared behind the blue waves, tearing across the sea on what whalers choose to call the ‘Nantucket sleigh ride’. Roger wondered if it was the last picture that would ever be taken of him. If they couldn’t get the water out of the boat faster than it came in, they would all very soon be on their way down to visit Davy Jones.

Suddenly the whale changed direction. The boat was yanked round to the right so forcibly that a man who had stood up to bail a bucket of water into the sea went over the side.

Roger was amazed that no one did anything about it.

‘Man overboard!’ he yelled.

Surely they would cut the tow-line, turn the boat about and go back to the rescue. But the mate gave no such order. He stood, gripping the steering-oar, gazing straight ahead at the speeding whale. The other men were equally silent. They kept on scooping out the water. The mate noticed that Roger had stopped work and was staring at him in astonishment.

‘Bail, boy, bail!’

‘But the man -‘

‘One of the other boats may pick him up. If not, it’s his bad luck.’ Seeing the shocked look on Roger’s face the mate went on: ‘You’ll soon learn, boy. Whaling is serious business. That big bull has a hundred barrels of oil in him. What d’ye think the captain would say if we let him go just to pick a man out of the water?’

Roger went back to bailing. He felt he was in a world of a hundred years ago. The whaling ship Killer stuck to the old traditions. Human life was cheap. What mattered was barrels of oil. Today, men who work are protected by many safety devices. In the old days a man must look out for himself and devil take him if he didn’t look sharp. Today, we are quite careful not to kill one man at a time - we only plan to kill a hundred thousand or a million at one blow with a hydrogen bomb. Roger gave up trying to figure which were more cruel, the old days or the new.

Suddenly the line slackened. The whale had again changed direction. It was now coming straight for the boat.

It had not been able to get rid of its enemy by running away. Now it was going to attack.

It opened its enormous jaws, revealing a cavern big enough to take boat and all. It was like looking through the door into a room twenty feet long and twelve feet wide.

But it was not a comfortable-looking room. The floor was paved with sharp teeth a foot long and weighing as much as four pounds each. The upper jaw had no teeth, but a row of sockets into which the teeth of the lower jaw would fit when the mouth was closed. It would be too bad for the man or the boat that happened to get ground into one of those sockets like meal in a mortar.

Roger had learned enough about whales to know that the sperm is a man-eater and boat-eater. It is quite different from the toothless baleen, or whalebone-whale, that has nothing in its mouth but a big sieve to catch the creatures of the sea that are its food. Such a whale couldn’t swallow a man, and wouldn’t want to. It could take a thousand crayfish but wouldn’t know what to do with a shark.

But the big sperm has no use for the little titbits that can be found on the surface of the sea. His favourite food is the enormous cuttlefish sometimes fifty feet long and equipped with a great savage beak that may kill the whale or wound it so badly that it will carry the scars for the rest of its life.

Such a whale can swallow a man as easily as a man may swallow a pill. Many times whalers have found a shark twelve feet long or longer in the stomach of a sperm-whale.

‘Lay to the oars!’ yelled the mate.

The men left bailing to row. The boat had not yet lost the momentum of its swift flight over the sea. This, helped by the rowing, carried it forward fast enough, so that when the whale arrived the boat was no longer there. It barely missed the jaws, which closed on the steering-oar, crunching it to bits.

Away went the whale, only to turn and come back again towards the boat. This time it dived, as if planning to come up beneath the boat and toss it into the air.

‘Hang on!’ shouted the mate.

The men clutched the gunwales and waited for the shock.

Now all could look forward to being dumped into the sea. Blood from the wound made by the harpoon had stained the water and attracted sharks. Roger suddenly realized that the man who had fallen overboard back there where there were no sharks and no angry whale was the lucky one after all.

The blow from beneath did not come. Instead, the line began to sing out of the tub in which it was coiled. ‘He sounds!’ said Durkins.

Roger heard no sound. Then he realized what Durkins had meant. When a whale ‘sounds’, it means that he dives deep. A strange word, when you come to think of it. A sounding whale makes no sound. On the surface he may have been blowing and splashing and champing his great jaws, and even groaning with pain, but when he dives you hear nothing. Nothing but the whirr of the line out of the tub as the great beast carries the harpoon deeper and deeper.

‘Look out for that line!’ commanded the mate. The flying line lashed about like an angry snake. If an arm or leg got caught in it the limb would be nipped off as neatly as if amputated by a surgeon’s saw. Either that, or the man would be snatched out of the boat by the whizzing line and carried down after the whale.

How deep would the whale go? The sperm-whale is the best diver on earth. With the greatest of ease he can go a quarter of a mile or more straight down.

A man would be crushed to a pulp long before he could reach such a depth. The pressure of the water upon his body would squeeze all the flesh out from between his bones and crush his skull. Even if he could descend to such a depth he could not rise again to the surface without getting a terrific case of the “bends’ that would cost him his life.

The line was nearly all gone from the tub. But there was a second tub of line, and a sailor hastily tied the two ends together. In a few seconds the first tub was empty, and the line was whirring out of the second so fast that the eye could not follow it. ‘He can’t go much deeper,’ said one of the men.

‘Can’t he, though?’ retorted the mate. ‘Ever hear what happened down near Panama? A submarine cable broke and a repair-ship was sent out to fix it. When the ship hauled the two broken ends to the surface a dead sperm-whale was found in the coils. That cable had been lying on the bottom of the sea, and the sea at that point is half a mile deep. To get caught in the cable, the whale had to dive half a mile straight down.’

‘We can’t afford to have this one dive so deep.’ said the man who had spoken before. ‘We have only three hundred fathoms of line.’

‘Better start snubbing,’ said the mate.

A sailor threw two loops of the line around a loggerhead, or post. The line still ran, but it was slowed by friction against the post and this increased the drag on the whale. The monster might even be discouraged from his downward dive.