When we had the trying-out finished—the whale made about sixty-three
barrels—we were not far from Bazaruta Island, and the captain thought
it a good chance to lay in some wood. Two boats were sent ashore, the
men taking axes, while the Clearchus lay near, and the rest of the
crew were busy with their cleaning and scrubbing. I was sent ashore
with the boats. The island, or at any rate the part of it which we
saw, was uninhabited, and was covered with a dense jungle of woods
and vines and creepers. There was an abundance of wood, but it was
rather hard to get, and we were there for two days, the boats taking
off the wood as fast as we got it cut. The second day I got lost in
the jungle, and I might be there yet if it had not been for Peter.
There were a good many snakes in the jungle, the cobra among them. I
did not know much about snakes, did not recognize the cobra, and did
not appreciate its quality. I had become separated from the others in
my pursuit of trees which I could tackle alone, and which would be of
any value as fuel. When at last I looked up, I realized that I was
lost. I had stepped so thoroughly around the tree that my trail in
had become obliterated, and I could not tell which way to go. I tried
several ways, but they all ended in a tangle of vegetation, and I
began to get really scared, but I did not like to yell. I stopped and
looked about me, and I saw a snake crawling sluggishly away.
My only experience with snakes had been with these little green or
mottled-brown grass snakes, about two feet long or less, or with
adders, and a couple of big blacksnakes. The blacksnakes I let alone,
but I was accustomed {221} to catch the grass snakes and treat them
as pets. I had a box in our back yard, covered with wire netting, in
which I put them, and kept them until my mother made too strenuous
objection to the practice. Then, although I could not understand
why she should object so strongly, I bowed to the inevitable. They
were pretty things, and quite harmless; even useful, but she neither
knew nor cared about that. So, when I saw that snake in the jungle,
instead of letting him go peaceably, as anybody else would have done,
and glad that he was going, I leaped after him. It was not so very
big, perhaps three or four feet long.
The snake hurried when I jumped, but I kept on, and it stopped and
faced me, rearing its head erect, some distance from the ground. Its
hood puffed out, and its head waved slowly from side to side. I began
to be scared then, and backed away. There was a slight movement in
the vines and bushes back of the snake, they parted silently, and I
saw Peter looking at me. I did not speak, but pointed at the snake.
Peter did not delay. His axe fell upon the snake, and cut it cleanly
in two parts.
“Come, lad,” said Peter. “We missed you, and nobody knew which way
you ’d gone. They ’re about done.”
I remonstrated. “But, Peter, my tree.” And I pointed at the fallen
monarch of the forest, which was about six inches through at the
butt, and twenty-five feet long.
Peter smiled. “Aye, lad, I heard it fall. It was by that I found you.
Maybe we ’ll get it, and maybe not. I think they ’re ready to put off
to the ship and are waiting for us.”
So I followed him, leaving my precious tree, and leaving the pieces
of the snake still writhing about on the ground. According to all my
lore, they would continue to writhe until sunset, which was not far
off. I determined to add to my curriculum a brief course upon snakes.
I felt sure that the course would meet Mr. Brown’s approval, and that
he was qualified to give it. {222}
We made sail on the Clearchus, and stood for the southern end of
Madagascar; rounded it, and stood northerly. There was rather
a strong current against us, but the wind held strong from the
east and southeast, and we made nearly four knots in spite of the
current. Peter was occupied with the stove boat. He had little help,
but he did not want any. There was a fascination in watching his
deliberate movements, every one of which was to the certain end; the
same kind of fascination which I used to feel in watching Oman, a
cabinet-maker, at work. Oman seemed slow, and his manner of working
would not have been approved by a modern efficiency expert, but he
knew his trade from top to bottom, and was a master workman. He loved
his work, as any master workman must. Not one of his deliberate
movements was wasted, and the beautiful end was reached with
surprising ease and quickness; and what an end it was! Peter was no
cabinet-maker, but his method of working was the same.
When we had made about half the length of Madagascar without even
raising a spout, we fell in with another New Bedford whaler, the
Apollo, and Captain Nelson went aboard of her for a gam with Captain
Hendrickson. I did not go. They gammed from early morning to late
in the afternoon, and then I saw Captain Nelson’s boat coming back.
The mate of the Apollo, who had been visiting us, hurried away with
his men. As far as I could gather from what I overheard, the master
of the Apollo had not communicated anything of value. She was a full
ship, however, on her way home, and the old man—Captain Nelson—felt
sure that she had found some new cruising ground, either in the
Indian Ocean or in the Pacific, he thought more likely the Indian
Ocean. He had spent the day in detective work, trying to find some
clue to its location, but without result. Whaling captains, when
they have happened upon a new field, guard the secret as carefully
as they can, but it leaks out in a year or two. {223} No doubt
Captain Hendrickson was laughing at him at that moment. He said this,
standing on deck, looking back at the Apollo sinking into the sea
behind us. She was hull down already, enveloped in a purple haze,
for the sun was near its setting. The captain stood for some time
silently gazing, until the old-fashioned square topsails of the
Apollo were lost in the haze. Then he turned, smiling, to go below.
“I ’ll find it, by Godfrey,” he muttered to himself, “if I have to
comb these seas with a fine-toothed comb.”
Two days later we raised a spout nearly in sight of Tamatave.
Tamatave is on the east coast of Madagascar, in about 18° south
latitude. It was a calm morning, and the whale was about three miles
off. He was lying lazily on the surface, and we watched him for an
hour and a half, waiting for him to go down. At last he decided to
go. His flukes went straight up into the air, and he went down in a
very leisurely manner, as if it was almost too much trouble to eat.
It was as if he sighed and said, “Well, here goes. I suppose I must
get to work.” That was the way I felt on that morning, and I had no
doubt the whale felt much the same. Why should n’t whales feel so?
We lowered two boats, and pulled to the spot. There was a gentle
little breeze, and both boats put up their sails and sailed to and
fro, waiting for him to come up. I was enjoying myself thoroughly,
and did not care if he never came up. Indeed, we began to think he
never would. It got to be an hour since he had gone down, and there
was no sign of him. Then an hour and five minutes, and we lowered the
sail and unstepped the mast. This was hardly done when he appeared
silently, an eighth of a mile away, heading toward us. We were in an
excellent situation, for as he was coming on, and could not see us,
there was nothing for us to do but wait for him.
He continued to forge ahead slowly, Mr. Baker’s boat, half a mile or
more astern of him, pulling up as hard as the {224} men could pull.
The whale was to windward of us, and we could hear his spout plainly,
loud and hoarse and deep-toned. It sounded like the exhaust of the
Monohanset, the boat that ran between New Bedford and the Vineyard.
We waited, our oars out, and still he came on blindly, steering a
somewhat zigzag course, to enlarge his field of vision, and stopping
now and then, with his head out of water, to listen.
He was pretty near us now, and the Prince was getting excited and
impatient. He signalled Mr. Brown with his lips moving silently, to
have the men pull a few strokes to lay us on, but Mr. Brown shook
his head. Again the whale heaved his head out, almost within darting
distance.
“Now, pull! A good stroke!”
We pulled with all our might. It was only about thirty feet that we
had to go. We ranged alongside of his head, and he was very plainly
trying to make out what the noise was, and where it came from. The
moment we came within his field of sight he began to settle. There
was no other possible escape; but he was not quick enough, and the
Prince planted one iron deep in his shoulder, just above his fin. The
whale had settled too deep for the second iron, which did not bite at
all. By the time both irons had been let go we were backing off.
That whale immediately lost all signs of leisureliness and laziness,
and went down so fast that it was all we could do to keep the line
whipping clear out of the tub. The end of that tub was approaching
rapidly, and the other tub was bent on as fast as a man could work.
Still there was no sign of slackening in the speed of sounding, and
the end of the second tub, too, was not far off.
“The drug!” was the cry. “Drug, there! Hurry!”
The drug, or drag, was hastily passed. Our drags were of two pieces
of plank, crossed, and bolted securely together, with a loop of whale
line through the centre. On the opposite side from the loop a strong,
stubby staff {225} projected about a foot. It was meant that a piece
of canvas should be fastened to the staff. The canvas might survive
dragging through the water, and would make the drag more conspicuous
on the surface; but there was none on our drags that day. There
seldom was any.
The end of the line in a tub is always exposed for just such
occasions, and our second tub of line was hastily bent on to the
loop of the drag, and the drag held clear, ready to go overboard.
This was scarcely done when the last coil of line snapped out of the
tub, and the drug made a bee line for the bottom of the sea. We lay
there helpless, without a foot of whale line in the boat, and our
whale—nobody knew where he was exactly, but somewhere under us, from
one to two hundred fathoms deep. A line will follow all the windings
of its course under water, very nearly, and the whale might have
turned at some depth, and the line still go straight down.
That must have been just what this whale did, as it turned out, for
he rose soon after, about a quarter of a mile away, and made off just
a little faster than the boats could go, although we tried hard. The
drug appeared some minutes after the whale had shown himself, and
went skittering off after him, jumping from sea to sea, or from one
side to the other, tantalizingly near. Both boats followed it. It
did not go very much faster than we did, pulling our hearts out for
an hour dead to windward; but it gained on us very slowly, and we
gave it up at last, and lay on our oars, while we watched that drug
flash in the sun, farther and farther away. It flashed its last,
and we turned and pulled back to the ship, leaving the whale in
possession of two good harpoons, almost two hundred fathoms of nearly
new whale line, and a perfectly good drug, a work of art. I hoped he
would enjoy their use. We never heard anything more of any of them.
Possibly, even now, there is a whale, fairly old, swimming the seas
somewhere, with an old rusty harpoon {226} encysted in his shoulder,
the remains of a frayed old line trailing from it, fringed with
green or brown trailing weed along its whole length, encrusted with
barnacles, and alive with little crabs and sea-horses. I am confident
that he has never been taken.
After our exploit with that whale we cruised to the eastward to the
north of Mauritius, but did not raise a spout. Captain Nelson seemed
to have made up his mind that there were no more whales to be found
in those waters, for he stood away to the northwest, for the northern
end of Madagascar. We passed within sight of it, but did not stop.
There was a good deal of speculation among the crew as to where we
were going, for although the mastheads were kept manned, the routine
of cruising grounds was abandoned, and the Clearchus was under a
press of sail for a whaler. The men insisted that she was bound
for some definite port on the east coast, and when we had passed
Madagascar, and the course was changed by a point or so, many of them
said that it was Zanzibar. In the forecastle they had long disputes
upon the matter, and I listened, but took no part in them. I was
often there.
My own position on the ship was somewhat unusual. I was still cabin
boy, but I was one of Mr. Brown’s crew too, and had been for some
months. I had grown nearly a foot in the past year, was a great,
overgrown sixteen-year-old boy, with more muscle than I knew how to
manage. I must have been a raw, red, awkward chap, but fortunately
for me I did not know it. In virtue of my place in the boat I had
acknowledged right in the forecastle, and I availed myself of it as
often as I could. I loved to be there, sitting on the deck, perhaps,
under the flaring tin lamp, or on a sea-chest which stood in a dark
corner, and listening to the talk of the men. That talk, I suppose,
was not edifying, but I did not join in it, and I heard there many
yarns of whales and whaling, to which {227} I listened with open
ears and open mouth—and open nose. The smells of that forecastle!
I found out where we were probably bound by the simple expedient of
looking on the chart. I had been rather neglecting my privileges in
that respect. The course which was being pricked there led straight
to Zanzibar or very near it, although there was no certainty that
the course might not be changed. There was no other port of any
consequence but Zanzibar. There was elation among most of the old
sailors when I told them of it, but Peter shook his head doubtfully.
“Zanzibar,” he said thoughtfully. “I know it well enough. It ’s full
of wickedness, and that of no white man’s sort. Sodom and Gomorrah
were nothing to it.”
Three days later we dropped our anchor in the harbor of Zanzibar.
{228}