Swept Out to Sea Part 16

CHAPTER XVIII

IN WHICH WE REALIZE THE "GRIND" OF THE WHALEMAN'S LIFE

According to Ben Gibson, they immediately gave me up for dead. The chance that my arm had not been torn away from the shoulder was small, and once thus crippled they expected the spouting blood to attract the sharks, and then--good night!

But while I remained conscious I had not even thought of those monsters; nor do I believe that a single one of the beasts came near me while I followed the whale toward the bottom of the sea.

The men in my boat were helpless. They might not aid me in the least.

Nor did they know when I severed the line and started for the surface again. The weight of the hemp kept it down, although it stopped running out. Fortunately it uncoiled from my arm, or I would have been held down there and drowned.

They stared in horror over the sides of the whaleboat, trying to distinguish any moving object in the depths, and as moment after moment pa.s.sed they glanced at each other and shook their heads. I was lost.

They had no hope of ever even seeing me again.

And then it was that the sharp eyes of the old boat-steerer descried my arm above the surface, not many yards away.

"There! look yon!" he yelled. "Pull, you lubbers!"

They shot the boat ahead and the old man seized me, plunging in his arm to the shoulder as I sank again. Ben had begun to strip off his clothing, bound to dive for me if the old man missed. But there was no need of that, and they hauled me over the side into the boat a deal more dead than alive.

Indeed, I fought when they brought me back to consciousness. It was awful suffering, that recovery--that return to the world which I had every reason to suppose I had said good-bye to. It was a good half hour before I began to realize where I was, and what was happening to me.

We could not go back to the ship, however. Whale fishing is a grim business. A struck whale has completely smashed a boat, leaving its crew struggling in the water, and the other boats have gone on after the monster and left their companions to paddle about on the wreckage as best they can until the leviathan is killed.

The other boats from the Scarboro were all busy and our boat was behind.

We had lost our whale and the better part of two lines had gone with the iron. Before I could do more than lie on the bottom of the boat, under the men's feet, and gasp, we were pulling after the wounded female again. She had come up for air and lay sullenly on the surface not half a mile away.

She was a Tartar; but old Tom got another iron in her, and later Ben Gibson killed her with two bomb-pointed lances. When the old bark came down upon us about night she was dead and we hauled her alongside--the first fish to be grappled to. But the other boats brought in three more.

We were having great luck and for two more days worked like Trojans.

But the school of cachelots we had followed had disappeared then. The Scarboro sailed many a league farther south--and toward the Horn--before we raised a single whale. We were 40 degrees south then--below the de la Plata. I feared that the old bark would not put in at Buenos Ayres and there would be no chance of my returning home by steamship.

Not that I was yet tired of my work and the life we led. No, indeed. But I was anxious to hear from home, and I believed letters must be waiting me there at Buenos Ayres--and money, too.

No use to think of touching port, however, when the weather was so fine and whales were so infrequently met with. The whole crew had begun to get anxious. Mr. Robbins grumbled that he didn't see the use of roaming about the South Atlantic, anyway. It was the Pacific that whales frequented.

"Why the last time I sailed in a windjammer," declared the mate, "we were four weeks getting around the Horn from Santiago, and there wasn't a day went over our heads that we didn't see plenty of whales. The minute we got onto this side of Fuego we never saw a fin--and we ran to Bahia. Wouldn't have known there ever was a whale in this darned old ocean."

But the beginning of the cruise had been fortunate, and the whales had not entirely forsaken the Atlantic despite the grumbling of the crew. We killed two small humpedbacks within the week and then came upon sperms again. At daybreak the lookout hailed and the sea seemed fairly alive with them.

We tumbled out and, with only a pannikin of coffee in our stomachs, and a cold bite in our fists, made off in the boats for the royal game. Ben Gibson's boat had a good tally so far and we were not going to let the others beat us much. We had our pick of half a dozen sperms and we took after a bull that seemed promising.

We struck on and the wounded whale ran a little way in fright, trying its best to shake out the harpoon. Finding this impossible, despite its porpoise-like gambols, the whale sounded; then occurred one of the strangest happenings that can be imagined. The bull went down, and we paid out a goodly portion of line. Finally the line stopped running, but the whale did not rise.

"What do you know about this, Tom?" demanded the young second mate.

"That critter's gone to sleep down there, hasn't it?"

"It'll be drowned!" exclaimed the old harpooner. "That's what'll happen to it."

"Drowned!" cackled one of the crew. "What you givin' us, old hardsh.e.l.l?

Drown a whale, eh? That's like the boy that pumped water on the frog to drown him."

"You wait and see," growled old Tom. "If that bull don't come up pretty soon we'll have a circus with it, now I tell ye!"

The whale gave no sign. We tried hauling on the line, and of course it wouldn't budge.

"It's sure got its feet stuck in the mud down there," admitted the second mate, and he stood up and wigwagged frantically for the ship.

There were only four boats out and the captain himself chanced to be aboard. He knew old Tom would not give up anything easy, and so he brought the Scarboro into hailing distance and we told him what had happened. We had caught a Tartar; the whale wouldn't come to the surface and we couldn't let go without losing our line and iron. It was no use jerking on that line. One can't play a whale like a rock ba.s.s!

We rowed to the ship and the line was carried aboard and tagged onto a winch. We got at it right then and, before long, up came the dead body of a whale. It was a good sized one--indeed, I thought at the start that it was bigger looking close beside the bark than it had seemed when we struck on.

And pretty soon we found out the reason why it seemed different. We couldn't find the harpoon Tom Anderly had thrown into it! The line was found jammed to the back of the whale's mouth and wound round its body--whales will roll over and over when struck just as an old salmon will when hooked.

That whale was drowned. A whale isn't a fish, anyway, and this one had been under water so long that it was too late, as Ben Gibson said, to bring forward any "first aid to the drowned" business!

What puzzled us all--from Captain Hi down to the cook's cat--was what had become of the iron?

"And, by jingoes!" cried the second mate, "we ain't got all our line back."

This was plainly a fact. When the whale was grappled onto the bark's side and the line unwound, we found that it still hung down into the sea and was quite taut.

"This blamed critter was anch.o.r.ed!" growled Tom Anderly. "And he dragged his anchor at that."

"Get onto the winch, boys," said Captain Rogers. "Let's see what's hung to it now."

We wound in the line and up came the whale that we had actually struck!

The harpoon still held in its body. Good reason why I had thought the first whale seemed different from the one we had chased.

Of course, this whale was drowned, too. When it sounded, the other whale must have crossed our line while feeding with open mouth. Feeling the strange sensation of the hemp in the back of its mouth, the creature had instinctively closed its jaws and, in the struggle, wound the line about its body and been drowned.

Of course, this had kept the first whale down until it had drowned and, marvelous to relate, we had got the both of them--and a tidy addition to our cargo they proceeded to make. The luck of the second mate's boat became proverbial after that haul.

But despite our luck, the real grind of the whaleman's life was taking hold of us now. It was work--hard, bone labor--if we "had luck," and it was likewise work if we missed and rowed hour after hour after an elusive sperm or, at the end of the day, had to row empty handed back to the bark.

Ben Gibson loved money; but he admitted to me that a fifteen hundred dollar prize for the voyage would scarcely pay him for the work and grind of our daily life aboard the Scarboro.

CHAPTER XIX

IN WHICH IS REPORTED A SERIES OF MISADVENTURES