_In Which Billy Topsail Joins the Whaler Viking and a
School is Sighted_
OF a sunny afternoon the Newfoundland coastal steamer _Clyde_ dropped
Billy Topsail at Snook's Arm, the lair of the whaler _Viking_: a
deep, black inlet of the sea, fouled by the blood and waste flesh of
forgotten victims, from the slimy edge of which, where a score of
whitewashed cottages were squatted, the rugged hills lifted their heads
to the clean blue of the sky and fairly held their noses. It was all
the manager's doing. Billy had but given him direction through the fog
from Mad Mull to the landing place of the mail-boat. This was at Ruddy
Cove, in the spring, when the manager was making an annual visit to the
old skipper.
"If you want a berth for the summer, Billy," he had said, "you can be
ship's boy on the _Viking_."
On the _Viking_--the whaler! Billy was not in doubt. And so it came to
pass, in due course of time, that the _Clyde_ dropped him at Snook's
Arm.
At half-past three of the next morning, when the dark o' night was but
lightened by a rosy promise out to sea, the _Viking's_ lines were cast
off. At half speed the little steamer moved out upon the quiet waters
of the Arm, where the night still lay thick and cold--slipped with
a soft chug! chug! past the high, black hills; factory and cottages
melting with the mist and shadows astern, and the new day glowing in
the eastern sky. She was an up-to-date, wide-awake little monster, with
seventy-five kills to her credit in three months, again composedly
creeping from the lair to the hunt, equipped with deadly weapons of
offense.
"'Low we'll get one the day, sir?" Billy asked the cook.
"Wonderful quiet day," replied the cook, dubiously. "'Twill be hard
fishin'."
The fin-back whale is not a stupid, passive monster, to be slaughtered
off-hand; nor is the sea a well-ordered shambles. Within the experience
of the _Viking's_ captain, one fin-back wrecked a schooner with a quick
slap of the tail, and another looked into the forecastle of an iron
whaler from below. The fin-back is the biggest, fleetest, shyest whale
of them all; until an ingenious Norwegian invented the harpoon gun,
they wallowed and multiplied in the Newfoundland waters undisturbed.
They were quite safe from pursuit; no whaler of the old school dreamed
of taking after them in his cockle shell--they were too wary and fleet
for that.
"Ay," the cook repeated; "on a day like this a whale can _play_ with
the _Viking_."
The _Viking_ was an iron screw-steamer, designed for chasing whales,
and for nothing else. She was mostly engines, winches and gun. She
could slip along, without much noise, at sixteen knots an hour; and
she could lift sixty tons from the bottom of the sea with her little
finger. Her gun--the swivel gun, with a three-inch bore, pitched at the
bow, clear of everything--could drive a four-foot, 123-pound harpoon
up to the hilt in the back of a whale if within range; and the harpoon
itself--it protruded from the muzzle of the gun, with the rope attached
to the shaft and coiled below--was a deadly missile. It was tipped with
an iron bomb, which was designed to explode in the quarry's vitals when
the rope snapped taut, and with half a dozen long barbs, which were to
spread and take hold at the same instant.
"Well," Billy Topsail sighed, his glance on the gun and the harpoon,
"if they hits a whale, that there arrow ought t' do the work!"
"It does," said the cook, quietly.
All morning long, they were all alive on deck--every man of that
Norwegian crew, from the grinning man in the crow's nest, which was
lashed to a stubby yellow mast, to the captain on the gun platform,
with the glass to his eyes, and the stokers who stuck their heads out
of the engine room for a breath of fresh air. The squat, grim little
_Viking_ was speeding across Notre Dame Bay, with a wide, frothy wake
behind her, and the water curling from her bows. She was for all
the world like a man making haste to business in the morning, the
appointment being, in this case, off a low, gray coast, which the
lifting haze was but then disclosing.
It was broad day: the sea was quiet, the sun shining brightly, the sky
a cloudless blue; a fading breeze ruffled the water, and the ripples
flashed in the sunlight. Dead ahead and far away, where the gray of
the coast rocks shaded to the blue of the sea, little puffs of spray
were drifting off with the light wind, like the puff of smoke from a
distant rifle: they broke and drifted and vanished.
From time to time mirror-flashes of light--swift little flashes--struck
Billy's eyes and darted away. Puff after puff of spray, flash after
flash of light: the far-off sea seemed to be alive with the quarry. But
where was the thrilling old cry of "There she blows!" or its Norwegian
equivalent? The lookout had but spoken a quiet word to the captain,
who, in turn, had spoken a quiet word to the steersman.
"W'ales," said the captain, whose English had its limitations. "Ho--far
off!"