THE NIGHT KING
The crew called Tomas Mendez, the acting third mate, the "Night King." I
have forgotten what forecastle poet fastened the name upon him, but it
fitted like a glove. In the day watches when the captain and mate were on
deck, he was only a quite, unobtrusive little negro, insignificant in size
and with a bad case of rheumatism. But at night when the other officers
were snoring in their bunks below and the destinies of the brig were in
his hands, he became an autocrat who ruled with a hand of iron.
He was as black as a bowhead's skin--a lean, scrawny, sinewy little
man, stooped about the shoulders and walking with a slight limp. His
countenance was imperious. His lips were thin and cruel. His eyes
were sharp and sinister. His ebony skin was drawn so tightly over the
frame-work of his face that it almost seemed as if it would crack when he
smiled. His nose had a domineering Roman curve. He carried his head high.
In profile, this little blackamoor suggested the mummified head of some
old Pharaoh.
He was a native of the Cape Verde islands. He spoke English with the
liquid burr of a Latin. His native tongue was Portuguese. No glimmer of
education relieved his mental darkness. It was as though his outside color
went all the way through. He could neither read nor write, but he was a
good sailor and no better whaleman ever handled a harpoon or laid a boat
on a whale's back. For twenty years he had been sailing as boatsteerer
on whale ships, and to give the devil his due, he had earned a name for
skill and courage in a thousand adventures among sperm, bowhead, and right
whales in tropical and frozen seas.
[Illustration: Waiting for the Whale to Breach]
My first impression of the Night King stands out in my memory with cameo
distinctness. In the bustle and confusion of setting sails, just after the
tug had cut loose from us outside Golden Gate heads, I saw Mendez, like an
ebony statue, standing in the waist of the ship, an arm resting easily on
the bulwarks, singing out orders in a clear, incisive voice that had in it
the ring of steel.
When I shipped, it had not entered my mind that any but white men would
be of the ship's company. It was with a shock like a blow in the face
that I saw this little colored man singing out orders. I wondered in a
dazed sort of way if he was to be in authority over me. I was not long in
doubt. When calm had succeeded the first confusion and the crew had been
divided into watches, Captain Winchester announced from the break of the
poop that "Mr." Mendez would head the port watch. That was my watch. While
the captain was speaking, "Mr." Mendez stood like a black Napoleon and
surveyed us long and silently. Then suddenly he snapped out a decisive
order and the white men jumped to obey. The Night King had assumed his
throne.
The Night King and I disliked each other from the start. It may seem
petty now that it's all past, but I raged impotently in the bitterness
of outraged pride at being ordered about by this black overlord of the
quarter-deck. He was not slow to discover my smoldering resentment and
came to hate me with a cordiality not far from classic. He kept me
busy with some silly job when the other men were smoking their pipes
and spinning yarns. If I showed the left-handedness of a landlubber in
sailorizing he made me stay on deck my watch below to learn the ropes. If
there was dirt or litter to be shoveled overboard, he sang out for me.
"Clean up dat muck dere, you," he would say with fine contempt.
The climax of his petty tyrannies came one night on the run to Honolulu
when he charged me with some trifling infraction of ship's rules, of which
I was not guilty, and ordered me aloft to sit out the watch on the fore
yard. The yard was broad, the night was warm, the ship was traveling on a
steady keel, and physically the punishment was no punishment at all. There
was no particular ignominy in the thing, either, for it was merely a joke
to the sailors. The sting of it was in having to take such treatment from
this small colored person without being able to resent it or help myself.
The very next morning I was awakened by the cry of the lookout on the
topsail yard.
"Blow! Blow! There's his old head. Blo--o--o--w! There he ripples. There
goes flukes." Full-lunged and clear, the musical cry came from aloft like
a song with little yodling breaks in the measure. It was the view-halloo
of the sea, and it quickened the blood and set the nerves tingling.
"Where away?" shouted the captain, rushing from the cabin with his
binoculars.
"Two points on the weather bow, sir," returned the lookout.
For a moment nothing was to be seen but an expanse of yeasty sea. Suddenly
into the air shot a fountain of white water--slender, graceful, spreading
into a bush of spray at the top. A great sperm was disporting among the
white caps.
"Call all hands and clear away the boats," yelled the captain.
Larboard and waist boats were lowered from the davits. Their crews
scrambled over the ship's side, the leg-o'-mutton sails were hoisted, and
the boats, bending over as the wind caught them, sped away on the chase.
The Night King went as boatsteerer of the waist boat. I saw him smiling to
himself as he shook the kinks out of his tub-line and laid his harpoons
in position in the bows--harpoons with no bomb-guns attached to the
spear-shanks.
In the distance, a slow succession of fountains gleamed in the brilliant
tropical sunshine like crystal lamps held aloft on fairy pillars. Suddenly
the tell-tale beacons of spray went out. The whale had sounded. Over the
sea, the boats quartered like baffled foxhounds to pick up the lost trail.
Between the ship and the boats, the whale came quietly to the surface at
last and lay perfectly still, taking its ease, sunning itself and spouting
lazily. The captain, perched in the ship's cross-trees, signalled its
position with flags, using a code familiar to whalemen. The Night King
caught the message first. He turned quickly to the boatheader at the
tiller and pointed. Instantly the boat came about, the sailors shifted
from one gunwale to the other, the big sail swung squarely out and filled.
All hands settled themselves for the run to close quarters.
With thrilling interest, I watched the hunt from the ship's forward
bulwarks, where I stood grasping a shroud to prevent pitching overboard.
Down a long slant of wind, the boat ran free with the speed of a
greyhound, a white plume of spray standing high on either bow. The Night
King stood alert and cool, one foot on the bow seat, balancing a harpoon
in his hands. The white background of the bellying sail threw his tense
figure into relief. Swiftly, silently, the boat stole upon its quarry
until but one long sea lay between. It rose upon the crest of the wave
and poised there for an instant like some great white-winged bird of
prey. Then sweeping down the green slope, it struck the whale bows-on and
beached its keel out of the water on its glistening back. As it struck,
the Night King let fly one harpoon and another, driving them home up to
the wooden hafts with all the strength of his lithe arms.
The sharp bite of the iron in its vitals stirred the titanic mass of
flesh and blood from perfect stillness into a frenzy of sudden movement
that churned the water of the sea into white froth. The great head went
under, the giant back curved down like the whirling surface of some
mighty fly-wheel, the vast flukes, like some black demon's arm, shot
into the air. Left and right and left again, the great tail thrashed,
smiting the sea with thwacks which could have been heard for miles. It
struck the boat glancingly with its bare tip, yet the blow stove a great
hole in the bottom timbers, lifted the wreck high in air, and sent the
sailors sprawling into the sea. Then the whale sped away with the speed
of a limited express. It had not been vitally wounded. Over the distant
horizon, it passed out of sight, blowing up against the sky fountains of
clear water unmixed with blood.
The other boat hurried to the rescue and the crew gathered up the
half-drowned sailors perched on the bottom of the upturned boat or
clinging to floating sweeps. Fouled in the rigging of the sail, held
suspended beneath the wreck in the green crystal of the sea water, they
found the Night King, dead.
When the whale crushed the boat--at the very moment, it must have
been--the Night King had snatched the knife kept fastened in a sheath on
the bow thwart and with one stroke of the razor blade, severed the harpoon
lines. He thus released the whale and prevented it from dragging the boat
away in its mad race. The Night King's last act had saved the lives of his
companions.
I helped lift the body over the rail. We laid it on the quarter deck near
the skylight. It lurched and shifted in a ghastly sort of way as the ship
rolled, the glazed eyes open to the blue sky. The captain's Newfoundland
dog came and sniffed at the corpse. Sheltered from the captain's eye
behind the galley, the Kanaka cabin boy shook a furtive fist at the dead
man and ground out between clenched teeth, "You black devil, you'll never
kick me again." Standing not ten feet away, the mate cracked a joke to
the second mate and the two laughed uproariously. The work of the ship
went on all around.
Looking upon the dead thing lying there, I thought of the pride with which
the living man had borne himself in the days of his power. I beheld in
fancy the silent, lonely, imperious little figure, pacing to and fro on
the weather side of the quarter-deck--to and fro under the stars. I saw
him stop in the darkness by the wheel, as his custom was, to peer down
into the lighted binnacle and say in vibrant tones, "Keep her steady," or
"Let her luff." I saw him buttoned up in his overcoat to keep the dew of
the tropical night from his rheumatic joints, slip down the poop ladder
and stump forward past the try-works to see how things fared in the bow.
Again I heard his nightly cry to the lookout on the forecastle-head,
"Keep a bright lookout dere, you," and saw him limp back to continue his
vigil, pacing up and down. The qualities that had made him hated when he
was indeed the Night King flooded back upon me, but I did not forget the
courage of my enemy that had redeemed them all and made him a hero in the
hour of death.
In the afternoon, old Nelson sat on the deck beside the corpse and with
palm and needle fashioned a long canvas bag. Into this the dead man was
sewed with a weight of brick and sand at his feet.
At sunset, when all hands were on deck for the dog watch, they carried
the body down on the main deck and with feet to the sea, laid it on the
gang-plank which had been removed from the rail. There in the waist the
ship's company gathered with uncovered heads. Over all was the light of
the sunset, flushing the solemn, rough faces and reddening the running
white-caps of the sea. The captain called me to him and placed a Bible in
my hands.
"Read a passage of scripture," he said.
Dumbfounded that I should be called upon to officiate at the burial
service over the man I had hated, I took my stand on the main hatch at
the head of the body and prepared to obey orders. No passage to fit my
singular situation occurred to me and I opened the book at random. The
leaves fell apart at the seventh chapter of Matthew and I read aloud the
section beginning:
"Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye
shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to
you again."
At the close of the reading the captain called for "The Sweet Bye and Bye"
and the crew sang the verses of the old hymn solemnly. When the full-toned
music ceased, two sailors tilted the gang-plank upwards and the remains of
the Night King slid off and plunged into the ocean.
As the body slipped toward the water, a Kanaka sailor caught up a bucket
of slop which he had set aside for the purpose, and dashed its filth over
the corpse from head to foot. Wide-eyed with astonishment, I looked to see
instant punishment visited upon this South Sea heathen who so flagrantly
violated the sanctities of the dead. But not a hand was raised, not a word
of disapproval was uttered. The Kanaka had but followed a whaler's ancient
custom. The parting insult to the dead was meant to discourage the ghost
from ever coming back to haunt the brig.