The Deep Sea Hunters: Adventures on a Whaler

by A. Hyatt Verrill

It was little wonder that Tom was incredulous of Jim’s news, for, to the boys, the ancient whaling bark Hector was as much of a fixture as the village church or the town hall. As long as they could remember the old ship had lain on the mud flat beside the abandoned old whaling docks, her dingy, weather-beaten sides rising far above the rotting stringpieces of the wharf; her spars, gray from countless storms and years of sunshine, sagging and awry; her tattered and frayed standing rigging slack and her deck warped and with open seams. Built nearly one hundred years ago, the Hector had for generations been the pride of the great New Bedford whaling fleet, but, long before either of the boys had been born, she had been towed to her resting place upon the Fair Haven flats and abandoned to the elements.

But to the boys of the village she had been a source of never failing amusement. Upon her decks they had played pirate, buccaneer and whaler by turns. Within her tumble-down deck houses imaginary mutineers and freebooters had massacred innumerable officers. From her broad, stout crosstrees the boys had peered forth at countless treasure islands, and within her dark and musty hold they had languished in chains or had stowed away on imaginary voyages.

Somehow, upon the old ship, the boys seemed actually to live in the stirring days they reacted, for old Capt’n Pem, the dock watchman, had spent many an afternoon spinning yarns of his youthful whaling days while seated on the heel of the Hector’s bowsprit. He had related stories of cannibal attacks, of mutinies, of boats stove in and ships rammed by frantic whales. The boys had listened breathlessly to his accounts of men drifting in open whaleboats for thousands of miles after being towed out of sight of their ships by whales, and as he had served as mate on two voyages of the Hector, the boys had but to close their eyes to see the characters he described and the exciting events in which he had taken part. Moreover, Jim, or, as his friends called him, “Jimmy,” had found the old log of the Hector in the Historical Society’s museum across the river in New Bedford, and the boys had read it word for word and had found it more fascinating than any book of fiction, for they knew every inch of the old bark as they did their own homes. They knew the very yardarm from which a mutineer had once been hung; they could still see the holes made by the bullets of Chinese pirates in the stout cabin door; they searched for and found the very bunk wherein the mate had been pinned down by the spear of a Solomon Island cannibal, and the criss-cross cuts where poor “Crazy Ned” had cut his “baccy” on the fo’c’sle steps were still visible. Tom, too—who was forever reading books on strange, far-away lands—had told the other boys of the places the old ship had touched on its many cruises. He painted vivid word pictures of the desolate Croisettes, of little-known Gough Island and volcanic Kerguelan in the storm-lashed Antarctic. He described the queer penguins and broad-winged albatrosses, the palm-fringed coral isles of the tropics, the swift proas of the Malays, the frozen wastes of the Arctic and the blistering doldrums, until he and his friends could transport themselves at will to any part of the world, or any spot in the seven seas, merely by clambering on to the Hector’s warped old decks and setting sail in make believe on a three years’ cruise.

And, best of all, the boys’ parents encouraged them, for they all were of old whaling stock and had almost as much fondness for the old Hector and the past glories of the whaling fleet as did the boys. Moreover, the boys’ fathers were not slow to notice that, by playing about the old bark and listening to Cap’n Pem’s yarns, the boys were absorbing a vast amount of useful knowledge of the sea and of seamanship, as well as of foreign lands and people. They had learned to climb aloft, to run up the ratlines and to man the yards like real sailors, and they acquired a full command of nautical terms, orders and phrases. And in this old Cap’n Pem had been their instructor. He had shown them how to knot, splice and bend ropes; he had made them repair the rotting ratlines and footropes; he had insisted that they must be “proper sailor men” in their play; and, in order to teach them how to swing and square the yards, clew up the sails and otherwise “navigate” the old hulk, he had helped them rig braces, halliards, clewlines and other running rigging from odds and ends stowed in his cozy little home at the head of the wharf. Under his tutelage the boys had learned how to box the compass, how to steer, how to give orders for trimming sail, and both Tom and Jim had gone a step farther and had learned how to “shoot the sun” and work out latitude and longitude.

Often, the old seaman would take a part in the boys’ fun himself; sometimes as captain, at other times as able-bodied seaman, which he always took as a huge joke, remarking with a chuckle that, “I’ve seen a mighty queer lot o’ timber a-callin’ o’ theirsel’s sailors; but I’ll be stowed if I ever seen a wooden-legged A. B. afore.”

But despite his wooden leg, Cap’n Pem managed to get about as lively as any of his young friends, and he would tail on to a brace and roar out some deep-sea chantey with the boys joining in the chorus, with as much vigor and heartiness as though the Hector were once more plowing her way through blue seas instead of being high and dry on a mud flat.

But neither Cap’n Pem nor the boys had ever dreamed of the Hector going to sea in reality. From her opened seams, grass and weeds were growing luxuriantly; within her hold the tide rose and fell exactly as it did outside and, as the old salt vowed that New Bedford whalers were built to last forever, the Hector seemed doomed to be a permanent landmark at the end of the elm-shaded street.

So, as the two boys hurried to the dock, Jim found it hard work to convince Tom that they were about to lose their wonderful playground.

“I just went down to see if you or any of the fellows were there,” explained Jim, “and I found a whole crowd of workmen. They had a truck full of rope and tackle and paint and tar and everything. Some of them were on board and others on the dock and they’d already taken off a lot of the old rigging and were tearing the grass and stuff out of the seams. Cap’n Pem was there too and I asked him what they were doing and he chuckled and said, ‘Didn’t I tell ye, Jimmy, a New Bedford ship weren’t never too old to go a-cruisin’? They’re a-fittin’ of the Hector fer a v’yge.’”

“I’ll bet he was just jollying you,” declared Tom. “Perhaps they’re going to fix her up and take a movie of her, just as they did on the Viola, you know. Perhaps that’s what Cap’n Pem meant—a movie voyage. Why, Jimmy, the Hector couldn’t go to sea.”