Fighting the Whales

CHAPTER V

A STORM, A MAN OVERBOARD, AND A RESCUE

The scenes in a whaleman's life are varied and very stirring. Sometimes he is floating on the calm ocean, idling about the deck and whistling for a breeze, when all of a sudden the loud cry is heard, "There she blows!" and in a moment the boats are in the water, and he is engaged in all the toils of an exciting chase. Then comes the battle with the great leviathan of the deep, with all its risks and dangers. Sometimes he is unfortunate, the decks are clean, he has nothing to do. At other times he is lucky, "cutting in" and "trying out" engage all his energies and attention. Frequently storms toss him on the angry deep, and show him, if he will but learn the lesson, how helpless a creature he is, and how thoroughly dependent at all times for life, safety, and success, upon the arm of God.

"Trying out" the oil, although not so thrilling a scene as many a one in his career, is, nevertheless, extremely interesting, especially at night, when the glare of the fires in the try-works casts a deep-red glow on the faces of the men, on the masts and sails, and even out upon the sea.

The try-works consisted of two huge melting-pots fixed upon brick-work fireplaces between the fore and main masts. While some of the men were down in the blubber-room cutting the "blanket-pieces", as the largest masses are called, others were pitching the smaller pieces on deck, where they were seized by two men who stood near a block of wood, called a "horse", with a mincing knife, to slash the junks so as to make them melt easily. These were then thrown into the melting-pots by one of the mates, who kept feeding the fires with such "scraps" of blubber as remain after the oil is taken out. Once the fires were fairly set agoing no other kind of fuel was required than "scraps" of blubber. As the boiling oil rose it was baled into copper cooling-tanks. It was the duty of two other men to dip it out of these tanks into casks, which were then headed up by our cooper, and stowed away in the hold.

As the night advanced the fires became redder and brighter by contrast, the light shone and glittered on the bloody decks, and, as we plied our dirty work, I could not help thinking, "what would my mother say, if she could get a peep at me now?"

The ship's crew worked and slept by watches, for the fires were not allowed to go out all night. About midnight I sat down on the windlass to take a short rest, and began talking to one of the men, Fred Borders by name. He was one of the quietest and most active men in the ship, and, being quite a young man, not more than nineteen, he and I drew to one another, and became very intimate.

"I think we're goin' to have a breeze, Bob," said he, as a sharp puff of wind crossed the deck, driving the black smoke to leeward, and making the fire flare up in the try-works.

"I hope it won't be a storm, then," said I, "for it will oblige us to put out the fires."

Just then Tom Lokins came up, ordered Fred to go and attend to the fires, sat down opposite to me on the windlass, and began to "lay down the law" in regard to storms.

"You see, Bob Ledbury," said he, beginning to fill his pipe, "young fellers like you don't know nothin' about the weather—'cause why? you've got no experience. Now, I'll put you up to a dodge consarning this very thing."

I never found out what was the dodge that Tom, in his wisdom, was to have put me up to, for at that moment the captain came on deck, and gave orders to furl the top-gallant sails.

Three or four of us ran up the rigging like monkeys, and in a few minutes the sails were lashed to the yards.

The wind now began to blow steadily from the nor'-west; but not so hard as to stop our tryworks for more than an hour. After that it blew stiff enough to raise a heavy sea, and we were compelled to slack the fires. This was all the harm it did to us, however, for although the breeze was stiffish, it was nothing like a gale.

As the captain and the first mate walked the quarter-deck together, I heard the former say to the latter, "I think we had as well take in a reef in the topsails. All hereabouts the fishing-ground is good, we don't need to carry on."

The order was given to reduce sail, and the men lay out on the topsail yards. I noticed that my friend Fred Borders was the first man to spring up the shrouds and lay out on the main-topsail yard. It was so dark that I could scarcely see the masts. While I was gazing up, I thought I observed a dark object drop from the yard; at the same moment there was a loud shriek, followed by a plunge in the sea. This was succeeded by the sudden cry, "man overboard!" and instantly the whole ship was in an uproar.

No one who has not heard that cry can understand the dreadful feelings that are raised in the human breast by it. My heart at first seemed to leap into my mouth and almost choke me. Then a terrible fear, which I cannot describe, shot through me, when I thought it might be my comrade Fred Borders. But these thoughts and feelings passed like lightning—in a far shorter time than it takes to write them down. The shriek was still ringing in my ears when the captain roared—

"Down your helm! stand by to lower away the boats."

At the same moment he seized a light hen-coop and tossed it overboard, and the mate did the same with an oar in the twinkling of an eye. Almost without knowing what I did, or why I did it, I seized a great mass of oakum and rubbish that lay on the deck saturated with oil, I thrust it into the embers of the fire in the try-works, and hurled it blazing into the sea.

The ship's head was thrown into the wind, and we were brought to as quickly as possible. A gleam of hope arose within me on observing that the mass I had thrown overboard continued still to burn; but when I saw how quickly it went astern, notwithstanding our vigorous efforts to stop the ship, my heart began to sink, and when, a few moments after, the light suddenly disappeared, despair seized upon me, and I gave my friend up for lost.

At that moment, strange to say, thoughts of my mother came into my mind, I remembered her words, "Call upon the Lord, my dear boy, when you are in trouble." Although I had given but little heed to prayer, or to my Maker, up to that time, I did pray, then and there, most earnestly that my messmate might be saved. I cannot say that I had much hope that my prayer would be answered—indeed I think I had none,—still, the mere act of crying in my distress to the Almighty afforded me a little relief, and it was with a good deal of energy that I threw myself into the first boat that was lowered, and pulled at the oar as if my own life depended on it.

A lantern had been fastened to the end of an oar and set up in the boat, and by its faint light I could see that the men looked very grave. Tom Lokins was steering, and I sat near him, pulling the aft oar.

"Do you think we've any chance, Tom?" said I.

A shake of the head was his only reply.

"It must have been here away," said the mate, who stood up in the bow with a coil of rope at his feet, and a boat-hook in his hand. "Hold on, lads, did anyone hear a cry?"

No one answered. We all ceased pulling, and listened intently; but the noise of the waves and the whistling of the winds were all the sounds we heard.

"What's that floating on the water?" said one of the men, suddenly.

"Where away?" cried everyone eagerly.

"Right off the lee-bow—there, don't you see it?"

At that moment a faint cry came floating over the black water, and died away in the breeze.

The single word "Hurrah!" burst from our throats with all the power of our lungs, and we bent to our oars till we wellnigh tore the rollicks out of the boat.

"Hold hard! stern all!" roared the mate, as we went flying down to leeward, and almost ran over the hen-coop, to which a human form was seen to be clinging with the tenacity of a drowning man. We had swept down so quickly, that we shot past it. In an agony of fear lest my friend should be again lost in the darkness, I leaped up and sprang into the sea. Tom Lokins, however, had noticed what I was about; he seized me by the collar of my jacket just as I reached the water, and held me with a grip like a vice till one of the men came to his assistance, and dragged me back into the boat. In a few moments more we reached the hen-coop, and Fred was saved!

He was half dead with cold and exhaustion, poor fellow, but in a few minutes he began to recover, and before we reached the ship he could speak. His first words were to thank God for his deliverance. Then he added:

"And, thanks to the man that flung that light overboard. I should have gone down but for that. It showed me where the hen-coop was."

I cannot describe the feeling of joy that filled my heart when he said this.

"Aye, who wos it that throw'd that fire overboard?" enquired one of the men.

"Don't know," replied another, "I think it wos the cap'n."

"You'll find that out when we get aboard," cried the mate; "pull away, lads."

In five minutes Fred Borders was passed up the side and taken down below. In two minutes more we had him stripped naked, rubbed dry, wrapped in hot blankets, and set down on one of the lockers, with a hot brick at his feet, and a stiff can of hot rum and water in his hand.

CHAPTER VI

THE WHALE—FIGHTING BULLS, ETC

As the reader may, perhaps, have been asking a few questions about the whale in his own mind, I shall try to answer them, by telling a few things concerning that creature which, I think, are worth knowing.

In the first place, the whale is not a fish! I have applied that name to it, no doubt, because it is the custom to do so; but there are great differences between the whales and the fishes. The mere fact that the whale lives in water is not sufficient to prove it to be a fish. The frog lives very much in water—he is born in the water, and, when very young, he lives in it altogether—would die, in fact, if he were taken out of it; yet a frog is not a fish.

The following are some of the differences existing between a whale and a fish:—The whale is a warm-blooded animal; the fish is cold-blooded. The whale brings forth its young alive; while most fishes lay eggs or spawn. Moreover, the fish lives entirely under water, but the whale cannot do so. He breathes air through enormous lungs, not gills. If you were to hold a whale's head under water for much longer than an hour, it would certainly be drowned; and this is the reason why it comes so frequently to the surface of the sea to take breath. Whales seldom stay more than an hour under water, and when they come up to breathe, they discharge the last breath they took through their nostrils or blowholes, mixed with large quantities of water which they have taken in while feeding. But the most remarkable point of difference between the whale and fishes of all kinds is, that it suckles its young.

The calf of one kind of whale is about fourteen feet long when it is born, and it weighs about a ton. The cow-whale usually brings forth only one calf at a time, and the manner in which she behaves to her gigantic baby shows that she is affected by feelings of anxiety and affection such as are never seen in fishes, which heartless creatures forsake their eggs when they are laid, and I am pretty sure they would not know their own children if they happened to meet with them.

The whale, on the contrary, takes care of her little one, gives it suck, and sports playfully with it in the waves; its enormous heart throbbing all the while, no doubt, with satisfaction.

I have heard of a whale which was once driven into shoal water with its calf and nearly stranded. The huge dam seemed to become anxious for the safety of her child, for she was seen to swim eagerly round it, embrace it with her fins, and roll it over in the waves, trying to make it follow her into deep water. But the calf was obstinate; it would not go, and the result was that the boat of a whaler pulled up and harpooned it. The poor little whale darted away like lightning on receiving the terrible iron, and ran out a hundred fathoms of line; but it was soon overhauled and killed. All this time the dam kept close to the side of its calf, and not until a harpoon was plunged into her own side would she move away. Two boats were after her. With a single rap of her tail she cut one of the boats in two, and then darted off. But in a short time she turned and came back. Her feelings of anxiety had returned, no doubt, after the first sting of pain was over, and she died at last close to the side of her young one.

There are various kinds of whales, but the two sorts that are most sought after are the common whale of the Greenland Seas, which is called the "right whale", and the sperm whale of the South Sea. Both kinds are found in the south; but the sperm whale never goes to the North Seas. Both kinds grow to an enormous size—sometimes to seventy feet in length, but there is considerable difference in their appearance, especially about the head. In a former chapter I have partly described the head of a right whale, which has whalebone instead of teeth, with its blowholes on the back of the head. The sperm whale has large white teeth in its lower jaw and none at all in the upper. It has only one blowhole, and that a little one, much farther forward on its head, so that sailors can tell, at a great distance, what kind of whales they see simply by their manner of spouting.

The most remarkable feature about the sperm whale is the bluntness of its clumsy head, which looks somewhat like a big log with the end sawn square off, and this head is about one-third of its entire body.

The sperm whale feeds differently from the right whale. He seizes his prey with his powerful teeth, and lives, to a great extent, on large cuttle-fish. Some of them have been seen to vomit lumps of these cuttle-fish as long as a whale-boat. He is much fiercer, too, than the right whale, which almost always takes to flight when struck, but the sperm whale will sometimes turn on its foes and smash their boat with a blow of his blunt head or tail.

Fighting-whales, as they are called, are not uncommon. These are generally old bulls, which have become wise from experience, and give the whalers great trouble—sometimes carrying away several harpoons and lines. The lower jaw of one old bull of this kind was found to be sixteen feet long, and it had forty-eight teeth, some of them a foot long. A number of scars about his head showed that this fellow had been in the wars. When two bull-whales take to fighting, their great effort is to catch each other by the lower jaw, and, when locked together, they struggle with a degree of fury that cannot be described.

It is not often that the sperm whale actually attacks a ship; but there are a few cases of this kind which cannot be doubted. The following story is certainly true; and while it shows how powerful a creature the whale is, it also shows what terrible risk and sufferings the whaleman has frequently to encounter.

In the month of August, 1819, the American whaleship Essex sailed from Nantucket for the Pacific Ocean. She was commanded by Captain Pollard. Late in the autumn of the same year, when in latitude 40 degrees of the South Pacific, a shoal, or "school", of sperm whales was discovered, and three boats were immediately lowered and sent in pursuit. The mate's boat was struck by one of the fish during the chase, and it was found necessary to return to the ship to repair damages.

While the men were employed at this, an enormous whale suddenly rose quite close to the ship. He was going at nearly the same rate with the ship—about three miles an hour; and the men, who were good judges of the size of whales, thought that it could not have been less than eighty-five feet long. All at once he ran against the ship, striking her bows, and causing her to tremble like a leaf. The whale immediately dived and passed under the ship, and grazed her keel in doing so. This evidently hurt his back, for he suddenly rose to the surface about fifty yards off, and commenced lashing the sea with his tail and fins as if suffering great agony. It was truly an awful sight to behold that great monster lashing the sea into foam at so short a distance.

In a short time he seemed to recover, and started off at great speed to windward. Meanwhile the men discovered that the blow received by the ship had done her so much damage, that she began to fill and settle down at the bows; so they rigged the pumps as quickly as possible. While working them one of the men cried out:

"God have mercy! he comes again!"

This was too true. The whale had turned, and was now bearing down on them at full speed, leaving a white track of foam behind him. Rushing at the ship like a battering-ram, he hit her fair on the weather bow and stove it in, after which he dived and disappeared. The horrified men took to their boats at once, and in ten minutes the ship went down.

The condition of the men thus left in three open boats far out upon the sea, without provisions or shelter, was terrible indeed. Some of them perished, and the rest, after suffering the severest hardships, reached a low island called Ducies on the 20th of December. It was a mere sand-bank, which supplied them only with water and sea-fowl. Still even this was a mercy, for which they had reason to thank God; for in cases of this kind one of the evils that seamen have most cause to dread is the want of water.

Three of the men resolved to remain on this sand-bank, for dreary and uninhabited though it was, they preferred to take their chance of being picked up by a passing ship rather than run the risks of crossing the wide ocean in open boats, so their companions bade them a sorrowful farewell, and left them. But this island is far out of the usual track of ships. The poor fellows have never since been heard of.

It was the 27th of December when the three boats left the sand-bank with the remainder of the men, and began a voyage of two thousand miles, towards the island of Juan Fernandez. The mate's boat was picked up, about three months after, by the ship Indian of London, with only three living men in it. About the same time the captain's boat was discovered, by the Dauphin of Nantucket, with only two men living; and these unhappy beings had only sustained life by feeding on the flesh of their dead comrades. The third boat must have been lost, for it was never heard of; and out of the whole crew of twenty men, only five returned home to tell their eventful story.

Before resuming the thread of my narrative, I must not omit to mention, that in the head of the sperm whale there is a large cavity or hole called the "case", which contains pure oil that does not require to be melted, but can be baled at once into casks and stowed away. This is the valuable spermaceti from which the finest candles are made. One whale will sometimes yield fifteen barrels of spermaceti oil from the "case" of its head. A large fish will produce from eighty to a hundred barrels of oil altogether, sometimes much more; and when whalemen converse with each other about the size of whales, they speak of "eighty-barrel fish", and so on.

Although I have written much about the fighting powers of the sperm whale, it must not be supposed that whales are by nature fond of fighting. On the contrary, the "right" whale is a timid creature, and never shows fight except in defence of its young. And the sperm whale generally takes to flight when pursued. In fact, most of the accidents that happen to whalemen occur when the wounded monster is lashing the water in blind terror and agony.

The whale has three bitter enemies, much smaller, but much bolder than himself, and of these he is terribly afraid. They are: the swordfish, the thrasher, and the killer. The first of these, the sword-fish, has a strong straight horn or sword projecting from his snout, with which he boldly attacks and pierces the whale. The thrasher is a strong fish, twenty feet long, and of great weight. Its method of attack is to leap out of the water on the whale's back, and deal it a tremendous blow with its powerful tail.

The sword-fish and thrasher sometimes act together in the attack; the first stabbing him below, and the second belabouring him above, while the whale, unable, or too frightened to fight, rushes through the water, and even leaps its whole gigantic length into the air in its endeavours to escape. When a whale thus leaps his whole length out of the water, the sailors say he "breaches", and breaching is a common practice. They seem to do it often for amusement as well as from terror.

But the most deadly of the three enemies is the killer. This is itself a kind of small whale, but it is wonderfully strong, swift, and bold. When one of the killers gets into the middle of a school of whales, the frightened creatures are seen flying in all directions. His mode of attack is to seize his big enemy by the jaw, and hold on until he is exhausted and dies.

CHAPTER VII

TOM'S WISDOM—ANOTHER GREAT BATTLE

One day I was standing beside the windlass, listening to the conversation of five or six of the men, who were busy sharpening harpoons and cutting-knives, or making all kinds of toys and things out of whales' bones. We had just finished cutting in and trying out our third whale, and as it was not long since we reached the fishing-ground, we were in high hopes of making a good thing of it that season; so that everyone was in good spirits, from the captain down to the youngest man in the ship.

Tom Lokins was smoking his pipe, and Tom's pipe was an uncommonly black one, for he smoked it very often. Moreover, Tom's pipe was uncommonly short, so short that I always wondered how he escaped burning the end of his nose. Indeed, some of the men said that the redness of the end of Tom's nose was owing to its being baked like a brick by the heat of his pipe. Tom took this pipe from his mouth, and while he was pushing down the tobacco with the end of his little finger, he said:

"D'ye know, lads, I've been thinkin'–"

"No, have ye?" cried one of the men, interrupting him with a look of pretended surprise. "Well now, I do think, messmates, that we should ax the mate to make a note o' that in the log, for it's not often that Tom Lokins takes to thinkin'."

There was a laugh at this, but Tom, turning with a look of contempt to the man who interrupted him, replied:

"I'll tell you wot it is, Bill Blunt, if all the thoughts that you think, and especially the jokes that you utter, wos put down in the log, they'd be so heavy that I do believe they would sink the ship!"

"Well, well," cried Bill, joining in the laugh against himself, "if they did, your jokes would be so light and triflin' that I do believe they'd float her again. But what have you been a-thinkin' of, Tom?"

"I've been thinkin'," said Tom slowly, "that if a whale makes his breakfast entirely off them little things that you can hardly see when you get 'em into a tumbler—I forget how the captain calls 'em—wot a tree-mendous heap of 'em he must eat in the course of a year!"