For some time Captain Coffin was excited and restless; even more
restless than usual, and he was always a restless and active man.
Although he would sometimes sit still for long periods, he left
you with the impression of activity, of tension, as though he was
prepared instantly for anything. At such times his eyes were very
bright, and from time to time his head turned alertly. I had no doubt
that he was hatching possible plans for the recapture of the Battles,
or, at any rate, that his brain was seething with ideas, probably
chaotic, which he was trying to reduce to something like order. We
were in the seas for which he was certain that she was bound, the one
refuge of every mutinous or piratical crew.
All of us had been thinking more or less of the Battles. My own
thoughts, I remember, were about equally divided between her and
cannibalism. Cannibalism always has a peculiar fascination for the
minds of young and old, although we older people pretend that it
is the scientific side, the history of the race, and the origin of
the practice that fascinates us. For a boy it is the gruesomeness
that fascinates, and I made no pretense about it. We had passed the
Solomons, about which I had heard various horrible tales, and were
passing the Fijis. We did not even see the Fijis, although I stood at
the rail for about two hours, straining my eyes to the eastward for a
possible sight of them, while the brisk trade wind blew in my face. I
got something out of it: dreams of coral islands, and of breadfruit
and coconuts, and the soothing of that great, steady wind upon my
spirit. I do not know what Captain Coffin got out of it. I saw him
standing at the main rigging, doing the same thing. {314}
When we got to the New Zealand grounds we began at once the regular
routine of cruising, but saw no whales for three days. We did see two
whalers, one of them from home, having sailed a week or two after we
did, and come around the Horn. This was the Henry, Captain Jefferson.
We lay to for the whole of that day, while we had a good gam, Captain
Nelson going aboard her for the forenoon, and their first mate coming
aboard of us. In the afternoon the two captains adjourned to the
Clearchus, and the Henry’s mate went back, followed by Mr. Baker in
his boat. The Henry had no mail for us—none for me, at least—and I
did not send any of my journal by her, only a brief letter to my
mother, for the chances were that we should get home as soon as she.
Each captain had whaling news of value to the other, and possibly
the rum on the Clearchus was different from the Henry’s, and they
wanted to compare them. Captain Jefferson put off about sunset, and
Mr. Baker came back. Much to the disappointment of Captain Nelson,
Captain Jefferson knew nothing about any new cruising ground, the
place where the Apollo had filled up.
A couple of days later we raised the spouts of a small pod of fairly
large whales, and got one of fifty barrels, which Mr. Macy killed.
The other boats chased for three hours in a heavy combing sea, but
the whales got away. After that we had the usual luck, nothing
extraordinary. We chased a good many times with no result, and got
three whales which gave up their lives quietly. The whales on the New
Zealand grounds were rather big fellows, for the most part, sixty
barrels and upward; and some have been taken there which ran well
over one hundred barrels—one of one hundred and thirty-seven barrels,
I believe, although we took none over eighty. Several of these large
whales gave us trouble.
The first of these was met when we had been there about three weeks.
The weather was boisterous, as it was {315} apt to be while we were
on those grounds. We raised a lone spout, very full and powerful, on
the lee bow. The whale was not feeding, but was coming to windward,
and we lowered three boats at once, Mr. Brown’s, Mr. Macy’s, and
Captain Coffin’s. Captain Coffin was hardly in condition yet to be
of the most service, but he was so eager to go that Captain Nelson
let him. All three boats pulled out ahead of the whale to cut him
off, and waited. When we first sighted the spout it was above three
miles distant, the whale swimming in a business-like way and making
five or six knots. We had plenty of time, therefore, to get into good
positions, and we drifted down before the wind directly upon his
course.
As he was approaching us head on, and as we were drifting without the
use of sail or oars—although the men had their oars in their hands
and held them in place, ready to use—there was nothing to give the
whale warning of our presence, and he came on quite unalarmed. When
he was a short distance away, he changed his course slightly, and it
looked, for some seconds, as though he would hit the boat, head on,
but Mr. Brown laid the boat around a bit, and we pulled a couple of
strokes. The next moment his old head, like a cliff of black granite,
weather-seamed and scarred, rose just beyond the bow oar. He spouted
and pitched under like a flash; but the Prince drove one iron into
him just above the fin. There was no chance for the second. The boat
whirled around quickly, and we were off, with the thrashing flukes
almost abeam. The next spout was thin blood.
The Prince and Mr. Brown changed places, and Mr. Brown called to
us to pull him up close so that he could put in another iron. No
sooner had we dropped our oars and laid hold of the line to pull,
than the whale milled short around, brought his nose accurately to
the stem of the boat without giving Mr. Brown a chance, and pushed
us fast astern. It was a delicate job for the Prince to hold {316}
us straight with the steering oar, and not to let the boat swing
around broadside, but for a boat length he did it. Mr. Brown, during
that time, was pushing with all his strength on the harpoon, the
sharp point against the whale’s rubber-like snout, but the barb
did not enter. We heard and saw the whale’s jaw snap up twice, but
of course it did not reach the boat. He spouted, sending the acrid
vapor, thinly mixed with blood, over us, setting us all to choking,
and almost turning me inside out. Then he withdrew a little, and
lay there wallowing in the seas, snapping his jaw, and snapping his
spout-hole with loud cracks. Sperm whales can snap the spout-hole,
which is shaped much like the _f_-hole of a violin, with tremendous
force. Meanwhile he was eyeing us with a malevolent eye, and no
wonder.
The other boats were coming up; they were nearly there. Mr. Brown
thought he saw a chance, and ordered us to pull up close. We did,
and the whale still lay there wallowing. We grounded on his back,
and Mr. Brown pumped his lance up and down twice. There was no time
for more, for the whale went down suddenly, with a flourish of his
flukes, barely missing us. He did not go deep, however, for while we
were watching the line and the sea, he floated up under us, belly up,
with his jaw almost at right angles with his body. There was no time
to escape. That jaw came down with a quick snap, cutting the boat
cleanly in two between the tub-and the after-oar, spilling the men
into the sea, and getting a tubful of line entangled in his teeth. I
saw him spout thick blood just as I went over, clinging to my oar.
When I had come to the surface, and had cleared the water out of my
eyes, the whale was trying to get rid of that tub of whale line. I
could hardly help laughing, although my situation was not one for
laughter, the whale reminded me so strongly of a person who had got
a mouthful of hair, or of the bristles from an old toothbrush. He
{317} seemed to feel almost the same disgust. The two other boats,
coming up, were almost at his flukes, and the ship had come very
near. The whale caught sight of her, and instantly made for her with
a vigor unexpected in a whale that spouts thick blood. The ship was
broadside on, and her sails were already aback, so that she could do
nothing. The whale struck her with his head amidships. If he had been
merely angry, and not hurt, that butting might very well have been
a catastrophe for us. But the vigor with which he had started had
ebbed rapidly away, and his butt was feeble, although I saw the upper
masts quiver, and the masthead man was rattled about like a die in a
box. Then he drew off and rammed again. That second attempt was more
feeble yet. He could do no more than rub against the hull; and he
passed under her, and floated to the surface on the other side, fin
out, with no flurry, unless his feeble buttings had been his flurry.
Mr. Macy and Captain Coffin were picking us up. The tub-oarsman was
found floating amid the wreckage, his arm over his oar, unconscious.
He did not recover consciousness for an hour, but then seemed to be
all right. He must have been hit on the head by something, nobody
could guess what. They would have thought it the teeth of the whale,
except that the lower jaw, which contains all the teeth, is too
narrow to reach both the tub-and the after-oarsman; and Black Man’el
was again severely mauled by the teeth of the whale, on the same
side that was so recently healed. This time it was not his arm, but
his back. On that ebony surface there were three or four bloody
wipes, where the teeth had ripped it in the process of closing. Black
Man’el, however, did not miss a day’s duty on account of it, taking
his regular place in the boat when it was called away, although his
back must have been lame and sore for days.
That whale made eighty-five barrels. As I was watching the mates
cutting off the head, Peter stopped for a moment beside me. {318}
“He’s a scarred old lad,” he said, “is n’t he, Timmie? Do you see the
marks of teeth he ’s carried around for many a year?”
I did see them; old scars of the teeth of some other bull, running
up diagonally from his mouth. That other bull must have bitten deep,
for each tooth-mark was separate, and still formed a little hollow,
like the little weathered hollows in a rock, where water gathers, or
the regular marks of a drill. There were other scars, too, of wounds
where the teeth seemed to have ripped and torn their way viciously.
“How do they get those scars, Peter? Fighting, I suppose; but how do
they fight?”
“I ’ve never seen them fighting, lad. But those who have seen it tell
me that they draw off from each other a little way, and go at each
other full tilt. They turn on their side, like, to give their jaws
play, and bite and wrench and tear. Sometimes they ’ll use their jaws
like fencing foils, without drawing off; but however they do it, they
must be savage at it. If they fence, they don’t wear masks.”
“Shall we see fighting whales, Peter?”
He smiled. “We may see ’most anything, lad. It ’s hard to tell. I ’ve
never seen ’em, but perhaps my turn is due for that this voyage.”
I wished fervently that we might see it. I watched for it with new
interest, and whenever we raised a pod I hoped that they might take
it into their heads to fight—fight among themselves, not us. I told
Peter of my hope one day.
“Bless your heart, lad,” he said, unsmiling, which was good of him,
“they won’t fight. They ’re in the same school. Wait until you see a
schoolmaster take on a fellow of about the same size that ’s trying
to get his job. Then you may see it.”
I knew nothing about schoolmasters, but I was ashamed {319} to ask,
and I said nothing. We were trying-out at the time, and the air was
filled with the acrid black smoke of scrap, and the deck covered with
oil mixed with soot. Only the day before we had raised a pod of large
whales, and I had had great hopes, for they were of a size to make a
good fight if they took a notion to. But nothing seemed farther from
their intention than to fight among themselves. They led us a very
pretty chase—from their point of view. We were pulling hard after
them from sunrise until noon. Mr. Macy had the only chance. George
Hall got an iron well into one, but it twisted off near the head, and
all got away.
We had scarcely got the boats on the davits when a whale rose and
spouted, not a hundred yards from the ship. Mr. Baker bellowed out
for a crew on the instant, and I ran to his boat, the first one
there. The Prince, Peter, Kane, and the Admiral were the others. We
had the boat in the water, tumbled in, and were pulling for the whale
in less than a minute. The Prince struck with both irons, and the
whale sounded at once, with a grand flourish of flukes. He sounded
out very nearly all our line; so nearly all of it that we bent on a
drug, while Mr. Baker hailed the ship for more. Mr. Tilton’s boat was
already in the water, beginning to pull toward us, but we held the
whale at that depth, with but two flakes of line left in the tub.
Although that whale had not nearly had his spoutings out, he stayed
down over an hour. Mr. Tilton stood by, his line bent to the end of
ours, but Mr. Baker would not give up the whale until he had to. When
the whale rose at last, he did not come up with a rush, on a breach,
or half-breach, but he floated up, and came to the surface like an
old waterlogged timber, plainly exhausted. There was nothing for Mr.
Baker to do but to pull up and lance him at his leisure. Within ten
minutes the whale was in his flurry, and in a short time after he was
fast alongside the {320} ship. Mr. Baker estimated him at eighty
barrels, but by hard work we had him cut-in and on board by dark, and
the carcass cut adrift.
It was now past the middle of the season, and we put into Wellington
to fill our water-casks, to give the men a run ashore, and to get our
mail. There was no mail for me, but I sent home another instalment
of my journal, and I saw the town, which had little interest for me.
There was only one town which I cared about seeing, and that was more
than a year away, almost exactly on the other side of the world. I
had a great desire to see at least one of the Marquesas Islands, but
Wellington is not the Marquesas.
When we got back to our cruising grounds, whales were getting scarce
and wild and difficult of approach. The big whales seemed to have
gone. We did get one forty-barrel bull, one of a small school that
was running to leeward from another ship. We saw the ship in the
distance, and we saw her boats; but the whales were running faster
than the boats could go. Our one bull we intercepted, but the rest
ran away from us, straight to leeward, head out. It was useless to
chase them. The strange boats did not get nearer to us than a mile
and a half; then they gave it up, and went back to their ship, which
bore away to the southward without an attempt to speak us.
Captain Nelson must have made up his mind very suddenly to get out of
those waters. As soon as the trying-out of the forty-barrel bull was
finished we stood away to the northward, for the Ellices, Gilberts,
and Kingsmill; but most of all, I thought, to find those mysterious
grounds where the Apollo had filled up. Just after we had filled
away, Peter found me, and pointed in silence to the horizon. There
was a faint haze, but I made out a pair of topmasts, with yards on
them.
“A brig?” I asked, with but faint interest.
“A schooner,” Peter answered. “I saw her from aloft.” {321}
It dawned upon me then; it was the Battles, going the same way we
were. I watched her draw away from us. Then I saw Captain Coffin
watching, too.
{322}