to my condition, did I quite realise the full brutality and injustice
of the man as I might otherwise have done. I crept forward to my bunk,
to find myself shunned by all my shipmates as if I was a leper, which
treatment, as I had hitherto been a prime favourite, was very hard
to bear. But in the face of ignorant superstition like this I was
powerless. So I held my peace and sat solitary, my recovery being much
hindered by the miserable state of my mind. The rest of the passage to
Valparaiso was a time of such misery as I never experienced before or
since, and I wonder that they did not land a hopeless lunatic.
“However, I fought against _that_ successfully, determined to live if
I was allowed to, and at last, to my intense relief, I shook off the
dust of my feet against that detestable ship and her barbarous crew,
thankful that their cruelty had stopped short of heaving me overboard
as a sacrifice to the _manes_ of my lost shipmates.”
There was a silence of some minutes’ duration after he had finished his
yarn, then from one and the other came scraps of personalia confirming
the general outlines of his experiences as to the existence of those
nightmares of the sea of incredible size, as attested by the _ejecta_
of every dying cachalot. All gave it as their firm belief that it must
have been a sperm whale that swallowed Jonah in the long ago, but it
was the general opinion that as a rule a man was perfectly safe in the
water from a sperm whale except under such circumstances as had been
detailed, and that our friend had been the victim of a mistake on the
part of the hungry leviathan.
XXVI
THE TRAGICAL TALE OF THE BOOMERANG PIG
He was born under a baleful star. I know, because I was there at the
time. But at the outset of this veracious history, to prevent probable
misunderstanding, allow me to assert that what follows in all its
details is literally and absolutely true. Naturally deficient in
imagination, I would not attempt to embellish so curious a narrative
as this, which, were I gifted beyond all literary romancists, I should
only mar by adding fiction thereunto.
Well then, for the _locus in quo_, a lumbering old Yankee-built ship of
some 2000 tons burden, bound from Liverpool to Bombay with coal, and
at the inauspicious opening of my subject’s erratic career wallowing
in the storm-torn sea off the Cape of Good Hope. His mother was a
middle-aged lady pig, with a bitter grievance against mankind in
general, and her present owners in particular. Brought on board during
the vessel’s stay in Madras the previous year, she had never forgotten
or ceased to lament her native jungle, nor had the long course of
gentle treatment and good food modified by a single vengeful gasp her
virulent hatred of all and sundry. Insult was added to injury when, in
Liverpool, she was mated with an alien spouse, the chubby pink-flushed
whiteness of whose skin made no greater contrast to her inky hue than
did the calm placidity of his temper to her furious, unappeasable, and
continual rage. Many tokens of her regard were scored deeply along his
fat sides; indeed, but for the manifest impossibility of getting a
fair bite at him, it is only reasonable to suppose that she would have
devoured him alive.
Now it befell upon a certain evening, when a bitter north-east gale was
brewing under the lowering leaden sky, and the weird whistling of the
coming tempest made melancholy music through the complaining shrouds,
that an interesting event in her history drew near its fulfilment. In
anticipation of this occurrence, our carpenter had rigged up a rude
sort of fold under the top-gallant forecastle, and within its narrow
limits she was ranging tiger-like, champing her foam-flecked jaws, and
occasionally tobogganing from side to side in various unhappy attitudes
as the ship tumbled every way in the bewildered sea. When the watch to
which I (a small urchin of fourteen) belonged came on deck at midnight
I was immediately told off by my inveterate foe, the second mate, to
attend to the requirements of the “lady in the straw.” Inverted commas
are necessary, because the “straw” did not exist, nor any substitute
for it; nothing but the bare deck polished to a glossy slipperiness by
the incessant friction of the sliding sow. There was a fresh hand at
the bellows before we had been on deck many minutes, and all the watch
were soon perched aloft, struggling short-handedly with the acreage of
thundering canvas, while the ship plunged so violently that I could
only remain under the forecastle by clinging, bat-like, to the side of
the pen that confined the miserable mother-elect. During that vigil of
terror and darkness (for I had only one of those ancient teapot-shaped
lamps, that yield more smoking stench than light) eleven wretched
parti-coloured morsels of pork came into being, the advent of each
one exacerbating the feelings of the already frantic parent to such
a degree that she became a veritable fury, and to my terrified eyes
seemed to dilate with potentialities of destruction. Out of the whole
family I succeeded, at the imminent risk of my own life, in saving two
from the jaws of their maniacal mother, and one of those sagaciously
succumbed before eight bells. I received small thanks for my pains, and
narrowly escaped a colting at my tyrant’s hands, who saw his visions of
abundant sucking-pig rudely dispelled by what he was pleased to call my
“dam’ pig-headed foolishness.”
It boots not now to tell of the wealth of ingenuity I lavished
upon that ill-starred piglet, to whom I stood perforce _in loco
parentis_--how I must needs lasso the snorting, shrieking mother, and,
having entangled her legs fore and aft, drag her to the side of the pen
and lash her securely down, while I held my _protégé_ to one streaming
teat after another. Enough that the care of that solitary remnant of a
family embittered my days and rendered my nights sleepless interregnums
of weariness. Unto all things their appointed end, saith the sage, and
so at last I was freed from this porcine incubus by my charge having
grown able and wily enough to dodge his unnatural parent, and snatch
his sustenance from her in a variety of ingenious ways. But still he
might not trust himself to sleep near her, and so he discovered a nest
beneath the heel of the bowsprit, whereby her insatiable desire for his
destruction was completely frustrated, since she could by no possible
artifice get at him. After a while it was noticed that Sûsti (as for
some hidden reason he had come to be called) invariably wore at the end
of his tail a crimson ornament, which, upon closer examination, was
found to be where something amused itself, or themselves, by nibbling
during the night. The carpenter, who is always called upon to repair
everything on board ship except ropes and sails, turned to and bound up
the lessening terminal with a piece of tarred canvas, and plentifully
besmeared the outside of the bandage with tar also. And this he did
many days, because tar, and dressing, and a little more of Sûsti had
always disappeared in the morning. So the outrage continued, and the
tail became more and more abbreviated until it was entirely _non est_,
and the midnight marauders had actually excavated a socket in the
_corpus delicti_ nearly half an inch deep.
By this time we had reached Bombay, and were busy, with the aid of a
swarming host of coolies, in getting rid of our grimy cargo. But some
one found time to suggest that a place of safety for Sûsti should
be found during the night, fearing that, unless something was done
soon, we should seek him one morning and find only a disembodied
squeal. Consequently Sûsti was captured every evening, and, protesting
discordantly, was confined in a coal-basket, which was carefully
enclosed in the after hatch house. The plan succeeded admirably, so far
that the diminution in our stock of pork ceased. But one morning, when
the after hold was empty, the hatch house was lifted off as usual and
placed by the side of the gaping hatchway, its door open, and Sûsti
lying, forgotten, in his basket. All hands went to breakfast, while the
coolies below, as was their wont, stopped work, and, squatting in the
after-hold, held a conversazione. In the middle of our meal there was a
hideous uproar, and an eruption of the heathen from all the hatchways,
greenish-grey with fright, and swarming madly in every possible
direction--overboard, aloft, anywhere. When at last we were able to
elicit from the demented crowd the reason for their panic, we learned
that as they were all toiling strenuously to prepare the coal for a
renewal of our operations, down into their midst came flying a demon of
Jehannum in the guise of a gigantic pig, with vast bat-like wings, and
eyes of the bigness of a man’s fists glaring like red-hot coals. What
wonder that they had fled, Hindoo and Mussulman alike, at the sight of
their abomination in such an avatar of dread hurtling down upon their
shaven crowns. The story sent us all seeking below, little dreaming
that the luckless Sûsti was to blame. Presently we found him lying by
the side of the keelson, badly hurt, but cheerful as ever. And with
that indomitable pluck that had endeared him to us all, he not only
survived, but made a complete recovery within a week.
Now, however, his rotund body had taken a curve, by reason of which
he always appeared to be in the act of reaching around to look for
the tail that had been. This peculiar bent of his figure had the
strangest results whenever he took exercise. Wherever his goal might
be, and in spite of his most energetic efforts to reach it, he only
succeeded in describing what I am obliged to call a lateral parabola,
along which he would eventually arrive at some unforeseen spot near
his starting-point. Nor were the co-efficients of his curves at
all regular. Sometimes, owing to the energetic efforts he made to
counteract this inevitable curvilinear bias, a series of maxima and
minima were produced which, when traced upon the deck, afforded some
very interesting problems in the parallelograms of forces.
But I regret to record that the principal result of his errata was a
decided increase in the local consumption of Scotch whisky. For our
jovial skipper became so inordinately vain of his boomerang pig that
he issued invitations to his fellow-captains in the harbour, in quite
a reckless fashion, to come and see what an unprecedented curio he had
gotten. They came multitudinously, came to scoff, but remained to grow
purple with laughter and lose all their loose change in bets upon the
probable points of arrival made by Sûsti in his gyratory gallops after
sweet biscuits. And they returned to their several ships in a charming
variety of unconventional attitudes, vocal but not harmonious, at
irregular intervals during the night. Meanwhile Sûsti, pampered beyond
even swinish dreams of avarice, waxed fat and almost uncontrollable.
_Joie de vivre_ filled him from end to end--from snout to socket.
It seized him suddenly at all sorts of times, causing him to squeal
hysterically, waggle his incipient hams momentarily, and then launch
himself into space along the line of some marvellously complicated
curve terminating in the most unexpected places.
As long as Europeans were about him he was safe, except for an
occasional belabouring when he chanced to upset some luckless
passer-by. But we were ordered round the coast to Cocanada in ballast,
and, to expedite our loading there, took a number of coolies with us.
On the day of our arrival, and shortly after anchoring, all hands
were seated peacefully at dinner on the forecastle head. Below, on
the shady side of the forward house, the “bundaree” had prepared the
coolies’ meal, an immense flat dish of rice piled into a cone, with a
number of tiny wells of curry round the rim, and a larger reservoir of
the same fiery compound at the apex in a sort of crater. Around this
the placid Hindoos crouched on their hams in orthodox fashion, and each
right hand had just begun to manipulate a bolus of curry-moistened
rice for conveyance to the expectant mouths, when with a meteoric
rush Sûsti came round the corner of the house in a grand ellipse, and
landed in the centre of the rice-pan. This was too much for even those
mild coolies. With yells and imprecations they sprang for handspikes,
belaying-pins, etc., and rushed upon the unclean beast, perfectly mad
with rage. Our big retriever, who hated all black men impartially, and
was therefore rigidly limited to the poop as a rule, saw the melée,
and, judging doubtless that it was high time for his interference,
came flying from his eminence, all shining teeth and savage snarl,
into the centre of the struggling mass. For a brief moment nothing
could be clearly distinguished; then suddenly there was a break up and
a stampede. Every coolie sprang overboard like the demon-possessed
swine of Gadara, leaving Neptune sadly sniffing at the lifeless body of
Sûsti, which lay embedded in a heap of the befouled and scattered rice.
XXVII
A DAY ON THE SOLANDER WHALING-GROUND
A bright sunny morning; the gentle north-easterly breeze just keeping
the sails full as the lumbering whaling-barque _Splendid_ dips jerkily
to the old southerly swell. Astern, the blue hills around Preservation
Inlet lie shimmering in the soft spring sunlight, and on the port beam
the mighty pillar of the Solander Rock, lying off the south-western
extremity of New Zealand, is sharply outlined against the steel-blue
sky. Far beyond that stern sentinel, the converging shores of Foveaux
Strait are just discernible in dim outline through a low haze. Ahead,
the jagged and formidable rocks of Stewart Island, bathed in a mellow
golden glow, give no hint of their terrible appearance what time the
Storm-fiend of the south-west cries havoc and urges on his chariot of
war.
The keen-eyed Kanaka in the fore crow’s nest shades his eyes with his
hand, peering earnestly out on the weather bow at something which has
attracted his attention. A tiny plume of vapour rises from the blue
hollows about ten miles away, but so faint and indefinable that it may
be only a breaking wavelet’s crest caught by the cross wind. Again that
little bushy jet breaks the monotony of the sea; but this time there
is no mistaking it. Emerging diagonally from the water, not high and
thin, but low and spreading, it is an infallible indication to those
piercing eyes of the presence of a sperm-whale. The watcher utters
a long, low musical cry, “Blo-o-o-o-w,” which penetrates the gloomy
recesses of fo’ksle and cuddy, where the slumberers immediately engage
in fierce conflict with whales of a size never seen by waking eyes. The
officer and white seamen at the main now take up the cry, and in a few
seconds all hands are swiftly yet silently preparing to leave the ship.
She is put about, making a course which shortly brings her a mile or
two to windward of the slowly-moving cachalot. Now it is evident that
no solitary whale is in sight, but a great school, gambolling in the
bright spray. One occasionally, in pure exuberance of its tremendous
vitality, springs twenty feet into the clear air, and falls, a hundred
tons of massive flesh, with earthquake-like commotion, back into the
sea.
Having got the weather-gage, the boats are lowered; sail is immediately
set, and, like swift huge-winged birds, they swoop down upon the prey.
Driving right upon the back of the nearest monster, two harpoons are
plunged into his body up to the “hitches.” The sheet is at once hauled
aft, and the boat flies up into the wind; while the terrified cetacean
vainly tries, by tremendous writhing and plunging, to rid himself of
the barbed weapon. The mast is unshipped, and snugly stowed away; oars
are handled, and preparation made to deliver the _coup de grâce_. But
finding his efforts futile, the whale has sounded, and his reappearance
must be awaited. Two boats’ lines are taken out before the slackening
comes, and he slowly rises again. Faster and faster the line comes
in; the blue depths turn a creamy white, and it is “Stern all,” for
dear life. Up he comes, with jaws gaping twenty feet wide, gleaming
teeth and livid, cavernous throat glittering in the brilliant light.
But the boat’s crew are seasoned hands, to whom this dread sight is
familiar, and orders are quietly obeyed, the boat backing, circling and
darting ahead like a sentient thing under their united efforts. So the
infuriated mammal is baffled and dodged, while thrust after thrust of
the long lances are got home, and streamlets of blood trickling over
the edges of his spout-hole give warning that the end is near. A few
wild circlings at tremendous speed, jaws clashing and blood foaming
in torrents from the spiracle, one mighty leap into the air, and the
ocean monarch is dead. He lies just awash, gently undulated by the
long, low swell, one pectoral fin slowly waving like some great stray
leaf of _Fucus gigantea_. A hole is cut through the fluke and the line
secured to it. The ship, which has been working to windward during the
conflict, runs down and receives the line; and in a short time the
great inert mass is hauled alongside and secured by the fluke chain.
The other two boats have succeeded in killing a large fish also, but
are at least four miles off. They may as well try to move the Solander
itself as tow their unwieldy prize to the ship. The shapeless bulk
of the cachalot makes it a difficult tow at all times, but, with a
rising wind and sea, utterly impossible to whale-boats. The barometer
is falling; great masses of purple-edged cumuli are piling high on
the southern horizon, and no weather prophet is needed to foretell
the imminent approach of a heavy gale. The captain looks wistfully
to windward at Preservation Inlet, only twenty-five miles off, and
thinks, with fierce discontent, of the prize, worth eight or nine
hundred pounds, which lies but four or five miles away, and must be
abandoned solely for want of steam-power. And that is not all. Around,
far as the eye can reach, the bushy spouts are rising. Hundreds of
gigantic cetaceans are disporting, apparently not at all “gallied” by
the conflict which has been going on. Some are near enough to the fast
boat to be touched by hand. “Potentialities of wealth beyond the dreams
of avarice” are here; but acquisition is impossible for want of steam.
The vessel, bound to that immense body, can only crawl tortoise-like
before the wind--lucky, indeed, to have a harbour ahead where the
whale may be cut in, even though it be forty miles away. Without that
refuge available, she could not hope to keep the sea and hold her prize
through the wild weather, now so near. So, with a heavy heart, the
captain orders the fast boat to abandon her whale and return with all
possible speed. The breeze is freshening fast, and all sail is made for
Port William. So slow is the progress, that it is past midnight before
that snug shelter is reached, although for the last four hours the old
ship is terribly tried and strained by the press of sail carried to
such a gale.
In four days the work of getting the oil is finished, and three or four
Maoris ashore have made a tun and a half of good clear oil from the
abandoned carcass. This, added to the ship’s quantity, makes twelve
and a half tuns of oil and spermaceti mingled from the one fish. None
smaller has been noticed out of the hundreds seen on the same day. It
is eighteen days from the time of anchoring before the harbour can
again be quitted, owing to adverse winds and gales. Who can estimate
the number of opportunities lost in that time? On the second day after
reaching the grounds, another school is seen with the same result--one
fish, and another fortnight’s enforced idleness.
This is no imaginary sketch, but a faithful record of actual facts,
which, with slight variations, has been repeated many times within
the writer’s experience. On one occasion there were four of us on the
ground in company--three Americans, and one colonial. Each secured a
whale before dusk. We kept away at once for Port William, fearing the
shifting of the wind, which would bring us on a ragged, lee shore. The
Americans, being strangers to the coast, hauled off to the westward.
Five days afterwards, as we were cleaning ship after trying out,
those three ships came creeping in to the harbour through the eastern
end of Foveaux Strait, all sadly damaged, and of course whaleless.
They had been battered by the furious gale all that time, and barely
escaped destruction on the Snares. Two of them left the grounds a
few days after, having had their fill of the Solander. Thus, it is
obvious that nothing but steam is needed to make this most prolific of
whaling-grounds a veritable treasure-field. Cutting in and trying out
at sea could be entirely dispensed with. The magnificent land-locked
harbour of Preservation Inlet, to say nothing of others easily
available, affords complete facilities for a shore station. The water
is in many cases forty or fifty fathoms deep alongside the rocks, while
sheltered nooks abound, “where never wind blows loudly.”
Working by the share, no finer or more skilful whalemen exist than the
half-breed Maoris who people Stewart Island, and they would joyfully
welcome such a grand opportunity of making their pile.
Long before the Antarctic Expedition from Dundee left our shores, the
merits of this grand field for whaling operations were discussed at
length by the writer in the columns of a Dundee paper, and strongly
advocated; but those responsible for the management of that venture
were evidently so wedded to Greenland methods that the advice was
unheeded. Perhaps the unprofitable issue of the enterprise as far as
whales were concerned may dispose the adventurers to take advice, and
try sperm-whaling in the temperate zone, in place of right-whaling in
the far south. Should they do so, there is every reason to hope and
believe that the palmy days of the sperm-whale fishery may be renewed.
Dundee firms of to-day may then, like Messrs. Enderby of London in
1820–30, gladly welcome home ship after ship, full to the hatches with
the valuable spoil of the Southern Seas.
NOTE.--Since the above was written it has been the writer’s
melancholy duty to chronicle the final disappearance of the
British Whale Fishery.
XXVIII
SEA-ELEPHANTS AT HOME
Judging by the popularity of the seals at the Zoological Gardens, these
wonderful amphibia have a firm hold upon the affections of ordinary
people. It probably occurs to but few as they gaze delightedly upon
the unapproachable grace of the seals in their favourite element, how
brutal and debasing is the pursuit of them for commercial purposes.
This is a theme that has exercised the powers of many able writers,
but has probably never been set forth in such awful realism as Mr.
Burn-Murdoch has presented us with in his book, _From Edinburgh to
the Antarctic_. For the seal is such a gentle, kindly creature, so
perfectly harmless, except perhaps during the courting season, when the
males fight fiercely, but never _à l’outrance_. The seal’s one mistake
in life is that he has not exerted the intelligence that he undoubtedly
possesses in the direction of clothing himself with some substitute,
worthless to man, for the inimitable covering which is so ardently
craved by shivering man and womankind.
There are, however, some seals that, from their bulk and ferocious
appearance, actually invite attack from those ardent sportsmen who
only long for sight of game worthy of hunting. The sea-elephant
(_Macrorhinus proboscideus_), upon first acquaintance, seems, as our
transatlantic friends concisely express it, “to fill the bill,” in
these respects. In size he is little inferior to the huge quadruped
after which he has been named, although, owing to the absence of
legs, he will not look so bulky as the elephant. The possession of a
rudimentary trunk of a foot or so in length has probably had little
to do with the trivial appellation given to this great Phoca, his
enormous size as compared with the ordinary seal being warrant enough
for the name. Since the sea-elephant’s hide is almost hairless, only
the massive coating of blubber he carries can excite the cupidity of
the hunter, and then only in the absence of anything that may be easier
obtained.