INCIDENTS OF A WHALING VOYAGE.
Captain Spofford was a weather-beaten veteran who gave little attention
to fine clothes, and greatly preferred his rough jacket and soft hat to
what he called "Sunday gear." He was much attached to his telescope,
which he had carried nearly a quarter of a century, and on the present
occasion he brought it into the cabin, and held it in his hand while he
narrated his whaling experiences. He explained that he could talk better
in the company of his old spy-glass, as it would remind him of things he
might forget without its aid, and also check him if he went beyond the
truth.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN SPOFFORD TELLING HIS STORY.]
"There are very few men in the whaling business now," said he, "compared
to the number twenty-five years ago. Whales are growing scarcer every
year, and petroleum has taken the place of whale-oil. Consequently, the
price of the latter is not in proportion to the difficulty of getting
it. New Bedford used to be an important seaport, and did an enormous
business. It is played out now, and is as dull and sleepy as a cemetery.
It was once the great centre of the whaling business, and made fortunes
for a good many men; but you don't hear of fortunes in whaling nowadays.
[Illustration]
"I went to sea from New Bedford when I was twelve years old, and kept at
whaling for near on to twenty-seven years. From cabin-boy, I crept up
through all the ranks, till I became captain and part owner, and it was
a good deal of satisfaction to me to be boss of a ship, I can tell you.
When I thought I had had enough of it I retired, and bought a small
farm. I stocked and ran it after my own fashion, called one of my oxen
'Port' and the other 'Starboard,' had a little mound like my old
quarter-deck built in my garden, and used to go there to take my walks.
I had a mast with cross-trees fixed in this mound, and used to go up
there, and stay for hours, and call out 'There she blows!' whenever I
saw a bird fly by, or anything moving anywhere. I slept in a hammock
under a tent, and when I got real nervous I had one of my farm-hands
rock me to sleep in the hammock, and throw buckets of water against the
sides of the tent, so's I could imagine I was on the sea again. But
'twasn't no use, and I couldn't cure myself of wanting to be on blue
water once more. So I left my farm in my wife's hands, and am going out
to Shanghai to command a ship whose captain died at Hong-Kong five
months ago.
"So much for history. Now we'll talk about whales.
[Illustration: SPERM-WHALE.]
"There are several kinds of them--sperm-whales, right-whales, bow-heads;
and a whaleman can tell one from the other as easy as a farmer can tell
a cart-horse from a Shetland pony. The most valuable is the sperm-whale,
as his oil is much better, and brings more money; and then we get
spermaceti from him to make candles of, which we don't get from the
others. He's a funny-looking brute, as his head is a third of his whole
length; and when you've cut it off, there doesn't seem to be much whale
left of him.
"I sailed for years in a sperm-whaler in the South Pacific, and had a
good many lively times. The sperm-whale is the most dangerous of all,
and the hardest to kill; he fights with his tail and his mouth, while
the others fight only with their tails. A right-whale or a bow-head will
lash the water and churn it up into foam; and if he hits a boat with his
tail, he crushes it as if it was an egg-shell. A sperm-whale will do all
this, and more too; he takes a boat in his mouth, and chews it, which
the others never do. And when he chews it, he makes fine work of it, I
can tell you, and short work, too.
"Sometimes he takes a shy at a ship, and rushes at it, head on. Two
ships are known to have been sunk in this way; one of them was the
_Essex_, which the whale ran into three times, and broke her timbers so
that she filled. The crew took to the boats, and made for the coast of
South America. One boat was never heard from, one reached the coast,
and the third was picked up near Valparaiso with everybody dead but two,
and those barely alive. Provisions and water had given out, and another
day would have finished the poor fellows. Another ship was the _Union_,
which was stove right under the bows by a single blow from a
sperm-whale, and went down in half an hour.
"I was fifteen years old when I pulled my first oar in a whale-boat; I
was boat-steerer at eighteen, and second mate at twenty, and before I
was twenty-one I had known what it was to be in the mouth of a
sperm-whale. It is hardly necessary to say that I got out of it as fast
as I could, and didn't stop to see if my hair was combed and my
shirt-collar buttoned. A man has no time to put on frills under such
circumstances.
[Illustration: "THERE SHE BLOWS!"]
"The way of it was this. The lookout in the cross-trees--we always keep
a man up aloft to look out for whales when we're on cruising ground--the
man had called out, 'There she blows!' and everybody was on his feet in
an instant.
"'Where away?' shouted the first mate.
"'Two points on the weather bow.'
"And before the words had done echoing he called out 'There she blows'
again, and a moment after again. That meant that he had seen two more
whales.
"We put two boats into the water, the first mate's and mine, and away we
went. We pulled our best, and the boats fairly bounced through the
waves. It was a race to see who could strike the first whale; we had a
good half mile to go, and we went like race-horses.
"Each boat has six men in her--a boat-steerer, as he is called, and five
at the oars. The boat-steerer handles the harpoon and lance and directs
the whole movement; in fact, for the time, he is captain of the boat.
[Illustration: IMPLEMENTS USED IN WHALING.]
"The first mate's boat headed me a little, and made for a big fellow on
the starboard. I went for another, and we struck almost at the same
instant. Within three boat-lengths, I stood up, braced my feet firmly,
poised my harpoon, and made ready to strike. The whale didn't know we
were about, and was taking it very easy. The bow of the boat was about
ten feet from his black skin when I sent the iron spinning and whizzing
away, and buried it deep in his flesh. Didn't he give a jump! You can
bet he did.
"'Starn all! starn all! for your lives!' I yelled.
"There wasn't a moment lost, and the boat went back by the force of the
strong arms of the men."
[Illustration: WHALE "BREACHING."]
"The whale lashed about and then 'breached;' that is, he threw his great
body out of the water, giving me a chance to get in a second harpoon.
Then he sounded--that is, he went down--and the lines ran out so fast
that the side of the boat fairly smoked when they went over. He ran off
two hundred fathoms of line before he stopped, and then we felt the line
slack and knew he would soon be up again.
"Up he came not a hundred yards from where he went down, and as he came
up he caught sight of the boat. He went for it as a cat goes for a
mouse.
"The sperm-whale can't see straight ahead, as his eyes are set far back,
and seem to be almost on his sides. He turns partly round to get a
glimpse of a boat, then ports his helm, drops his jaw, calculates his
distance, and goes ahead at full speed. His jaw is set very low, and
sometimes he turns over, or partly over, to strike his blow.
[Illustration: IN THE WHALE'S JAW.]
"This time he whirled and took the bow of the boat in his mouth,
crushing it as though it had been made of paper. We jumped out, the oars
flew all around us, the sea was a mass of foam, and the whale chewed the
boat as though it was a piece of sugar-candy and he hadn't seen any for
a month.
"We were all in the water, and nobody hurt. The first mate's boat had
killed its whale inside of ten minutes, and before he tried to sound.
They left the whale and came to pick us up; then they hurried and made
fast to him, as another ship was coming up alongside of ours, and we
might lose our game. It is a rule of the sea that you lose your claim to
a whale when you let go, even though you may have killed him. Hang on to
him and he's yours, though you may hang with only a trout-line and a
minnow-hook. It's been so decided in the courts.
"The captain sent another boat from the ship, and we soon had the
satisfaction of seeing my whale dead on the water. He got the lance
right in his vitals, and went into his 'flurry,' as we call it. The
flurry is the whale's convulsive movements just before death, and
sometimes he does great damage as he thrashes about."
Frank wished to know how large the whale was, and how large whales are
generally.
"We don't reckon whales by their length," Captain Spofford answered,
"but by the number of barrels of oil they make. Ask any old captain how
long the largest whale was that he ever took, and the chances are he'll
begin to estimate by the length of his ship, and frankly tell you he
never measured one. I measured the largest sperm-whale I ever took, and
found him seventy-nine feet long; he made a hundred and seven barrels of
oil. Here's the figures of him: nose to neck, twenty-six feet; neck to
hump, twenty-nine feet; hump to tail, seventeen feet; tail, seven feet.
His tail was sixteen feet across, and he was forty-one feet six inches
around the body. He had fifty-one teeth, and the heaviest weighed
twenty-five ounces. We took nineteen barrels of oil from his case, the
inside of the head, where we dipped it out with a bucket. I know one
captain that captured a sperm-whale ninety feet long, that made a
hundred and thirty-seven barrels, and there was another sperm taken by
the ship _Monka_, of New Bedford, that made a hundred and forty-five
barrels. I don't know how long he was.
"There's a wonderful deal of excitement in fastening to a whale, and
having a fight with him. You have the largest game that a hunter could
ask for; you have the cool pure air of the ocean, and the blue waters
all about you. A thrill goes through every nerve as you rise to throw
the sharp iron into the monster's side, and the thrill continues when he
plunges wildly about, and sends the line whistling over. He sinks, and
he rises again; he dashes away to windward, and struggles to escape; you
hold him fast, and, large as he is in proportion to yourself, you feel
that he must yield to you, though, perhaps, not till after a hard
battle. At length he lies exhausted, and you approach for the final blow
with the lance. Another thrilling moment, another, and another; and if
fortune is in your favor, your prize is soon motionless before you. And
the man who cannot feel an extra beat of his pulse at such a time must
be made of cooler stuff than the most of us.
"But you don't get all the whales you see, by a long shot. Many a whale
gets away before you can fasten to him, and many another whale, after
you have laid on and fastened, will escape you. He sinks, and tears the
iron loose; he runs away to windward ten or twenty miles an hour, and
you must cut the line to save your lives; he smashes the boat, and
perhaps kills some of his assailants; he dies below the surface, and
when he dies there he stays below, and you lose him; and sometimes he
shows such an amount of toughness that he seems to bear a charmed life.
We fight him with harpoon and lance, and in these later days they have
an invention called the bomb-lance or whaling-gun. A bomb-shell is
thrown into him with a gun like a large musket, and it explodes down
among his vitals. There's another gun that is fastened to the shaft of a
harpoon, and goes off when the whale tightens the line; and there's
another that throws a lance half-way through him. Well, there are
whales that can stand all these things and live.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN HUNTING'S FIGHT.]
"Captain Hunting, of New Bedford, had the worst fight that I know of,
while he was on a cruise in the South Atlantic. When he struck the
fellow--it was a tough old bull that had been through fights before, I
reckon--the whale didn't try to escape, but turned on the boat, bit her
in two, and kept on thrashing the wreck till he broke it up completely.
Another boat picked up the men and took them to the ship, and then two
other boats went in on him. Each of them got in two irons, and that made
him mad; he turned around and chewed those boats, and he stuck closely
to business until there wasn't a mouthful left. The twelve swimmers
were picked up by the boat which had taken the first lot to the ship;
two of the men had climbed on his back, and he didn't seem to mind them.
He kept on chewing away at the oars, sails, masts, planks, and other
fragments of the boats; and whenever anything touched his body, he
turned and munched away at it. There he was with six harpoons in him,
and each harpoon had three hundred fathoms of line attached to it.
Captain Hunting got out two spare boats, and started with them and the
saved boat to renew the fight. He got alongside and sent a bomb-lance
charged with six inches of powder right into the whale's vitals, just
back of his fin. When the lance was fired, he turned and tore through
the boat like a hurricane, scattering everything. The sun was setting,
four boats were gone with all their gear and twelve hundred fathoms of
line, the spare boats were poorly provided, the men were wearied and
discouraged, and Captain Hunting hauled off and admitted himself beaten
by a whale."
[Illustration: A GAME FELLOW.]
The nondescript individual whom we saw among the passengers early in the
voyage had joined the party, and heard the story of Captain Hunting's
whale. When it was ended, he ventured to say something on the subject of
whaling.
"That wasn't a circumstance," he remarked, "to the great whale that used
to hang around the Philippine Islands. He was reckoned to be a king, as
all the other whales took off their hats to him, and used to get down on
their front knees when he came around. His skin was like leather, and he
was stuck so full of harpoons that he looked like a porcupine under a
magnifying-glass. Every ship that saw him used to put an iron into him,
and I reckon you could get up a good history of the whale-fishery if you
could read the ships' names on all of them irons. Lots of whalers fought
with him, but he always came out first best. Captain Sammis of the
_Ananias_ had the closest acquaintance with him, and the way he tells it
is this:
"'We'd laid into him, and his old jaw came up and bit off the bow of the
boat. As he bit he gave a fling, like, and sent me up in the air; and
when I came down, there was the whale, end up and mouth open waiting for
me. His throat looked like a whitewashed cellar-door; but I saw his
teeth were wore smooth down to the gums, and that gave me some
consolation. When I struck his throat he snapped for me, but I had good
headway, and disappeared like a piece of cake in a family of children.
When I was splashing against the soft sides of his stomach, I heard his
jaws snapping like the flapping of a mainsail.
"'I was rather used up and tired out, and a little bewildered, and so I
sat down on the southwest corner of his liver, and crossed my legs while
I got my wits together. It wasn't dark down there, as there was ten
thousand of them little sea jellies shinin' there, like second-hand
stars, in the wrinkles of his stomach, and then there was lots of room
too. By-an'-by, while I was lookin' round, I saw a black patch on the
starboard side of his stomach, and went over to examine it. There I
found printed in injey ink, in big letters, "Jonah, B.C. 1607." Then I
knew where I was, and I began to feel real bad.
"'I opened my tobacco-box to take a mouthful of fine-cut to steady my
nerves. I suppose my hand was a little unsteady; anyhow, I dropped some
of the tobacco on the floor of the whale's stomach. It gave a convulsive
jump, and I saw at once the whale wasn't used to it. I picked up a
jack-knife I saw layin' on the floor, and cut a ping of tobacco into
fine snuff, and scattered it around in the little wrinkles in the
stomach. You should have seen how the medicine worked. The stomach began
to heave as though a young earthquake had opened up under it, and then
it squirmed and twisted, and finally turned wrong side out, and flopped
me into the sea. The mate's boat was there picking up the men from the
smashed boat, and just as they had given me up for lost they saw me and
took me in. They laughed when I told them of the inside of the whale,
and the printin' I saw there; but when I showed them the old jack-knife
with the American eagle on one side and Jonah's name on the other, they
stopped laughin' and looked serious. It is always well to have something
on hand when you are tellin' a true story, and that knife was enough.'
[Illustration: A FREE RIDE.]
"That same captain," he continued, "was once out for a whale, but when
they killed him, they were ten miles from the ship. The captain got on
the dead whale, and sent the boat back to let the ship know where they
were. After they had gone, a storm came on and drove the ship away, and
there the captain stayed three weeks. He stuck an oar into the whale to
hang on to, and the third week a ship hove in sight. As he didn't know
what she was, he hoisted the American flag, which he happened to have a
picture of on his pocket-handkerchief; and pretty soon the ship hung out
her colors, and her captain came on board. Captain Sammis was tired of
the monotony of life on a whale, and so he sold out his interest to the
visitor. He got half the oil and a passage to Honolulu, where he found
his own craft all right."
[Illustration: CAPTAIN SAMMIS SELLING OUT.]
"You say he remained three weeks on the back of that whale," said one of
the listeners.
"Yes, I said three weeks."
"Well, how did he live all that time?"
"How can I tell?" was the reply; "that's none of my business. Probably
he took his meals at the nearest restaurant and slept at home. And if
you don't believe my story, I can't help it--I've done the best I can."
With this remark he rose and walked away. It was agreed that there was a
certain air of improbability about his narrations, and Frank ventured
the suggestion that the stranger would never get into trouble on account
of telling too much truth.
They had a curiosity to know something about the man. Doctor Bronson
questioned the purser and ascertained that he was entered on the
passenger-list as Mr. A. of America; but whence he came, or what was his
business, no one could tell. He had spoken to but few persons since they
left port, and the bulk of his conversation had been devoted to stories
like those about the whaling business.
In short, he was a riddle no one could make out; and very soon he
received from the other passengers the nickname of "The Mystery." Fred
suggested that Mystery and Mr. A. were so nearly alike that the one name
was as good as the other.
While they were discussing him, he returned suddenly and said:
"The Captain says there are indications of a water-spout to-morrow; and
perhaps we may be destroyed by it."
With these words he withdrew, and was not seen any more that evening.
Fred wished to know what a water-spout was like, and was promptly set at
rest by the Doctor.
[Illustration: SHOOTING AT A WATER-SPOUT.]
"A water-spout," the latter remarked, "is often seen in the tropics, but
rarely in this latitude. The clouds lie quite close to the water, and
there appears to be a whirling motion to the latter; then the cloud and
the sea beneath it become united by a column of water, and this column
is what we call a water-spout. It is generally believed that the water
rises, through this spout, from the sea to the clouds, and sailors are
fearful of coming near them lest their ships may be deluged and sunk.
They usually endeavor to destroy them by firing guns at them, and this
was done on board a ship where I was once a passenger. When the ball
struck the spout, there was a fall of water sufficient to have sunk us
if we had been beneath it, and we all felt thankful that we had escaped
the danger."