WHALING IN MARGUERITA BAY.
Marguerita Bay lies on the Mexican coast about 200 miles north of Cape
St. Lucas. On arriving the schooner was “kedged” up the lagoons running
parallel with the coast fully one hundred miles. This took two weeks. We
passed, as it were, through a succession of mill-ponds, filled with low,
green islands, whose dense shubbery extended to the water’s edge. The
trunks of a small umbrella-shaped tree were washed by the tides to the
height of several feet, and thickly incrusted with small oysters. When
we wanted oysters we went on shore and chopped down a boatload of trees.
Is it necessary to remark that the trees did not grow the oysters. The
oysters grew on the trees, and they were as palatable as so many copper
cents, whose taste they resembled. When cooked, the coppery taste
departed. The channel through these lagoons was very crooked. It was
necessary to stake out a portion at low water, when it ran a mere creek
through an expanse of hard sand, sometimes a mile from either shore. At
high water all this would be covered to a depth of six or seven feet.
The _Henry_ grounded at each ebb, and often keeled over at an angle of
forty-five. From our bulwarks it was often possible to jump on dry
ground. This keeling-over process, twice repeated every twenty-four
hours, was particularly hard on the cook, for the inconvenience
resulting from such a forty-five-degree angle of inclination extended to
all things within his province. My stove worked badly at the angle of
forty-five. The kettle could be but half-filled, and only boiled where
the water was shallowest inside. The cabin table could only be set at an
angle of forty-five. So that while the guests on the upper side had
great difficulty in preventing themselves from slipping off their seats
on and over that table, those on the lower side had equal difficulty in
keeping themselves up to a convenient feeding distance. Captain
Reynolds, at the head of the board, had a hard lot in the endeavor to
maintain his dignity and sitting perpendicularly at the same time on the
then permanent and not popular angle of forty-five. But I, steward,
butler, cook, and cabin boy, bore the hardest tribulation of all in
carrying my dishes across the deck, down the cabin stairs, and arranging
them on a table at an angle of forty-five. Of course, at this time the
rack used in rough weather to prevent plates and platters from slipping
off was brought into permanent use. Transit from galley to cabin was
accomplished by crawling on two legs and one arm, thus making of myself
a peripatetic human triangle, while the unoccupied hand with difficulty
bore aloft the soup-tureen. It was then I appreciated the great
advantages afforded in certain circumstances by the prehensile caudal
termination of our possible remote ancestors. With such a properly
equipped appendage, the steward might have taken a close hitch round an
eyebolt, and let all the rest of himself and his dishes safely down into
the little cabin. It is questionable whether man’s condition has been
physically improved by the process of evolution. He may have lost more
than he has gained. A monkey can well afford to scorn the relatively
clumsy evolutions of the most skilful human brother acrobat.
Marguerita Bay was the nursery of the female whales, or in whaler’s
parlance, “cows.” The long, quiet lagoons, fringed with green, their
waters warmed by the sun to a most agreeable temperature, were the
resort during the spring months of the mother whales to bring forth and
nurse their young. The bulls generally remained outside. The cows were
killed with tolerable ease in the shoal waters of the bay. Outside they
have, on being struck, the reputation of running out all the line a boat
can spare and then demanding more. Grant could never have fought it out
on one line with a “California Gray.” In the lagoons, so long as the
calf was uninjured, the mother would slow her own pace, so as to remain
by her young. Thus she became an easy sacrifice. If the calf was
wounded, woe to the boat’s crew. The cow seemed to smell the blood the
moment it was drawn from its offspring. The first time this
happened--the boat-steerer accidentally slipping his lance into the
calf--the cow turned and chased the boat ashore. The tables were turned.
The miserable pigmies, who dared strike Leviathan’s child, were saved
because their boat could float where Mrs. Whale couldn’t. She drew at
least seven feet of water. A whale is one of the few things read of that
is bigger than it looks. The pigmies hauled the boat upon the beach,
while the whale for full half an hour swam to and fro where her
soundings were safe, and embargoed them. It was, with her, “Come off if
you dare.” But they didn’t care to dare, and finally she went away
unkilled. She managed, at the start to give the boat one crack, enough
to fill it with water. But whaleboats are made to be broken. A few
hours’ work and the insertion of a few bits of wood in the light
clinker-built sides will restore a whaleboat which, to an inexperienced
eye, looks fit only for kindling-wood. A whale is much more of an animal
than people generally imagine. There’s a great deal of affection
somewhere in that big carcass. I have seen them close aboard from the
schooner’s deck play with their young and roll and thrash about in
mammoth gambols. They knew the doors to these lagoons leading out into
the ocean as well as men know the doors to their houses. When struck,
though miles distant, they made straight for that door, and if not
killed before reaching it they escaped, for no boat, when fast, could be
towed through the huge Pacific breakers. Pigmy man in such case sullenly
cut his line and sulkily rowed back to his crowded little schooner to
growl at the cook.
We filled up in six weeks. Our luck was the envy of the eleven other
vessels in Marguerita Bay. This luck was mainly due to “Black Jake,” a
huge Jamaica negro, with the face of a Caliban, the arm of a Hercules
and a stomach greater than an ostrich’s for rum. When we left San
Francisco he had a tier of twenty-five bottles, full, stored under his
bunk, and not a soul was ever the wiser for it until all were emptied.
He kept his own head level, his own counsel, and lying in his berth in
the early evening hours of his watch below, would roll over, turn his
back to the noisy, chattering Kanaka audience of the forecastle, and
put the bottle, but not to his neighbors’ lips. He was king of the
forecastle, king of the Kanaka crew, and king of the whaleboat when
after a “muscle-digger.” He could throw a harpoon twice as far as an
ordinary man, and it was to this force of muscle, added to a certain
knack of his own in working up to the “grayback,” before striking, and
managing the boat after, that we owed our successful voyage. Great was
his fame as a whale-killer in Marguerita Bay. Many were the offers made
by masters of other vessels to bribe him from us. He remained true to
us. Hard were the knocks the cows gave their boats and sometimes their
crews. One well-appointed schooner lying near us had her boats stove
twenty-six times during our stay. Twelve men out of the fleet were more
or less injured. “Dese yere whale,” Jake would remark to his audiences
in the night yarns when one or two other boats’ crews from other vessels
came on board, “dey aint’ like oder whales. Dar ways are ’culiar, and ye
got to mind sharp how ye get onto ’em.” But nobody ever solved Jake’s
“’culiar way o’ getting onto ’em.”
A harpoon was not a toasting-fork to throw in the days when men oftener
threw the iron by muscle instead of powder. It is a shod, with a heavy
wooden pole five or six feet in length fastened into the socket of the
iron barb. This, with the line attached, makes a weight requiring for
the cast the use of both arms, and strong arms at that. A man would not
care to carry a harpoon more than a mile in a hot day. Its own weight,
as much as the impelling force, is depended on to bury itself in the
floating mound of seemingly polished India-rubber which constitutes a
whale above water. And when it first buries itself, there is for a few
seconds some vicious splashing and ugly flirting of fluke or fin. A
whale’s tail is an instrument of offence of about one hundred horse
power, and well adapted to cutting through a boat as a table knife goes
through an egg shell. The two fins suggest members between paddles and
rudimentary arms. It is also a member very capable of striking out from
the right or left shoulder, and striking very hard. When a half-dozen
men are within six feet of these weapons, controlled by an enormous
black sunken mass, eighty or one hundred feet long, they are apt to look
a trifle wild and their eyes have a tendency to bulge. There are stories
among whalemen of boat-steerers who have had all the grit permanently
taken out of them by the perils and catastrophes of that moment. A New
Londoner once had the cap swept from his head by the sweep of the
whale’s tail over it, and he was too nervous for boat service ever
afterward. It is no skulking fight, like shooting lions and tigers from
the shelter of trees or rocks. It’s a fair standup combat between half a
dozen men in an egg-shell of a boat on the open sea, and sometimes on
heavy ocean billows, and 500 tons of flesh, bone, and muscles, which, if
only animated by a few more grains of sense, could ram the whaleship
herself as effectually as an ironclad. As a murderous spectacle the
capture and killing of a whale, as seen even by a sea-cook from the
galley window, is something ultra-exciting. It makes one’s hair stand
upon both ends.
There is the whaleboat, the men sitting motionless in their seats, the
long oars apeak, shooting through the water, towed by the whale unseen
underneath the surface. Sometimes two or three boats hitch on, for the
more the whale has to drag the sooner he becomes exhausted. Now they
haul in on him and carefully coil the wet line in the tubs. Closer and
closer they near him, the passage of the great mass under water being
marked by swirls and eddies on the surface. Our herculean king, “Black
Jake,” is at the bow, the round, razor-edged, long-handled lance lying
by him, his back to the crew, his eye on the eddies, his great bare
black arms, now the right, now the left--moving first in one direction,
then another, as thus he signals to the steersman the direction in which
to keep the boat’s head; for although we are being towed as a tug would
tow a skiff, we must be kept as near as possible in a line with the
submerged motive power, and then, with a swash and snort, out of the
water six feet ahead comes twenty, may be forty feet of that great black
mass! It is astonishing how much there is of him. And he is down and
under, with his great gulp of air, in less time than it takes to write
or even speak these last twenty words, but not before the lance is out
of Jake’s hands, driven three feet into his side, and hauled aboard
again by the light, strong line attached. Suddenly the whale line
slacks. The boat ceases its rush through the water. The eddy and swirl
ahead cease. Now look out for squalls. This is one of Mrs. Grayback’s
peculiar tricks. She is ambushed somewhere below. She designs coming up
under the boat’s bottom, and constituting herself into a submarine
island of flesh, bobbing up like a released cork. She is resolving
herself into a submarine earthquake, and proposes to send that boat and
crew ten feet into the air, or capsizing them off her India-rubber
back. One hundred or five hundred tons of wicked intelligence is thus
groping about in the unseen depths for the purpose of attaining the
proper position, and, as it were, exploding herself like an animated
torpedo. Every seat in the boat is an anxious seat. There is no talking,
but a great deal of unpleasant anticipation. Those who have seen the
thing done before, await in dread suspense the shock and upset. It’s
very much like being over a powder-magazine about to explode. To keep up
the interest let us leave his particular boat and situation _in statu
quo_. Your imagination may complete the catastrophe or not, as you
choose. Final consummations are not desirable in a thrilling tale, and
this tale is meant to be thrilling. Therefore, if you’ve got a thrill in
you, please thrill.
From the schooner’s deck, a mile and a half away, Captain, cook, and
cooper--the head, tail, and midriff of the ship’s company--we perceive
that the white puff of spray from the whale’s blowholes has changed to a
darker color. “Spouting blood,” we remark. The boat is lying quite near
by. At intervals of a few minutes a circular streak of white water is
seen breaking the smooth surface of the lagoon. He’s in his “flurry.” He
is dying. It is a mighty death, a wonderful escape of vitality and
power, affection, and intelligence, too, and all from the mere pin’s
prick of an implement in the hands of yon meddlesome, cruel, audacious,
greedy, unfeeling pigmies. Spouting blood, bleeding its huge life away,
shivering in great convulsions, means only for us forty barrels more of
grease, and a couple of hundred pounds of bone to manufacture
death-dealing, rib-compressing, liver-squeezing corsets from. And all
the while the calf lingers by the dying mother’s side, wondering what
it is all about. Dead and with laborious stroke towed to the vessel, the
calf swims in its wake. Made fast alongside, its beautifully symmetrical
bulk tapering from head to tail in lines which man copies in the mould
of his finest yachts, the body remains all night, and in the still hours
of the “anchor watch” we can hear the feeble “blow” of the poor calf, as
it swims to and fro.
In the morning the mass which last night was but a couple of feet out of
water, has swollen and risen almost to the level of the low bulwark’s
top, while the gas generated by the decomposition within escapes from
each lance puncture with a faint sizzle. With the earliest light the
crew are at work. Skin and fat are torn off in great strips and hoisted
on board. Round and round the carcass is slowly turned, with each turn
another coil of blubber is unwound and cut off. The sharks are busy,
too. Monsters (I use the term “monsters” merely for the sake of euphony,
not liking to repeat the word “shark” so often) fifteen and eighteen
feet long rush up to the carcass, tear off great pieces of the
beefy-looking flesh and then quarrel with each other for its possession,
flirting the water with nose and fin, and getting occasionally a gash
from a sharp whale-spade which would take a man’s head off. Amid all
this, men shouting, swearing, singing, the windlass clanking, fires
under the try-pots blazing, black smoke whirling off in clouds, sharks
grabbing and fighting and being fought, the motherless calf still swims
about the mutilated carcass, and when cast adrift, a whity-yellowish
mass of carrion, swept hither and thither by wind and tide, it still
keeps it company until dead of starvation or mercifully devoured by the
“monsters.” Madame, every bone in your corset groans with the guilt of
this double murder.
After a whale had been “cut in,” or stripped of his blubber, an
operation somewhat resembling the unwinding of a lot of tape from a long
bobbin, the whale answering for the bobbin as he is turned round and
round in the water, and the blubber for the tape as it is windlassed
off, the whity-yellowish, skin-stripped carcass was then cast adrift,
and it floated and swelled and smelled. Day after day it swelled bigger
and smelled bigger. It rose out of the water like an enormous bladder.
It would pass us in the morning with the ebb tide and come back with the
flood. A coal-oil refinery was a cologne factory compared to it.
Sometimes two or three of these gigantic masses would be floating to and
fro about us at once. Sometimes one would be carried against our bows
and lodge there, the rotten mass lying high out of the water, oozing and
pressing over our low bulwarks on deck. We had a fight with one of these
carcasses for half an afternoon trying to pry it off with poles, oars,
and handspikes. It was an unfavorable mass to pry against. Of course it
smelt. For a dead mass it was extremely lively in this respect. There
are no words in which to describe a powerful smell so closely as to
bring it to the appreciation of the senses. It is fortunate there are
none, for some talented idiot to make his work smell and sell would be
certain to use them. The gulls used to navigate these carcasses on their
regular trips up and down the lagoons. They served these birds as a sort
of edible ferry-boat. You might see forty or fifty feeding and sailing
on a single carcass. But they seemed downcast--the dead whale was too
much for them. Not that they ever got full of the carrion, but they
exhausted themselves in the effort. The supply was unlimited; ditto the
void within the gull, but there were limits to his strength.