That oil money is the secret of the frantic industry of these seamen, who, when they do find themselves taking grease aboard, will work day and night, though night is but an expression up there, without a thought of fatigue. For the secure pay of officers and men is low indeed, and it is only by their share of the profits that they can hope to draw a good check when they return. Even the new-joined boy gets his shilling in the ton, and so draws an extra five pounds when a hundred tons of oil are brought back. It is practical socialism, and yet a less democratic community than a whaler’s crew could not be imagined. The captain rules the mates, the mates the harpooners, the harpooners the boat-steerers, the boat-steerers the line-coilers, and so on in a graduated scale which descends to the ordinary seaman, who, in his turn, bosses it over the boys. Every one of these has his share of oil money, and it may be imagined what a chill blast of unpopularity blows around the luckless harpooner who, by clumsiness or evil chance, has missed his whale. Public opinion has a terrorizing effect; even in those little floating communities of fifty souls. I have known a grizzled harpooner burst into tears when he saw by his slack line that he had missed his mark, and Aberdeenshire seamen are not a very soft race either.
THE FIRST SIGHT OF THE WHALE.
Though twenty or thirty whales have been taken in a single year in the Greenland seas, it is probable that the great slaughter of last century has diminished their number until there are not more than a few hundreds in existence. I mean, of course, of the right whale; for the others, as I have said, abound. It is difficult to compute the numbers of a species which comes and goes over great tracts of water and among huge icefields; but the fact that the same whale is often pursued by the same whaler upon successive trips shows how limited their number must be. There was one, I remember, which was conspicuous through having a huge wart, the size and shape of a beehive, upon one of the flukes of its tail. “I’ve been after that fellow three times,” said the captain, as we dropped our boats. “He got away in ’61. In ’67 we had him fast, but the harpoon drew. In ’76 a fog saved him. It’s odds that we have him now!” I fancied that the betting lay rather the other way myself, and so it proved; for that warty tail is still thrashing the Arctic seas for all that I know to the contrary.
I shall never forget my own first sight of a right whale. It had been seen by the lookout on the other side of a small icefield, but had sunk as we all rushed on deck. For ten minutes we awaited its reappearance, and I had taken my eyes from the place, when a general gasp of astonishment made me glance up, and there was the whale in the air. Its tail was curved just as a trout’s is in jumping, and every bit of its glistening lead-colored body was clear of the water. It was little wonder that I should be astonished, for the captain, after thirty voyages, had never seen such a sight. On catching it, we discovered that it was very thickly covered with a red, crablike parasite, about the size of a shilling, and we conjectured that it was the irritation of these creatures which had driven it wild. If a man had short, nailless flippers, and a prosperous family of fleas upon his back, he would appreciate the situation.
When a fish, as the whalers will forever call it, is taken, the ship gets alongside, and the creature is fixed head and tail in a curious and ancient fashion, so that by slacking or tightening the ropes, each part of the vast body can be brought uppermost. A whole boat may be seen inside the giant mouth, the men hacking with axes, to slice away the ten-foot screens of bone, while others with sharp spades upon the back are cutting off the deep great-coat of fat in which kindly Nature has wrapped up this most overgrown of her children. In a few hours all is stowed away in the tanks, and a red islet, with white projecting bones, lies alongside, and sinks like a stone when the ropes are loosed. Some years ago, a man, still lingering upon the back, had the misfortune to have his foot caught between the creature’s ribs, at the instant when the tackles were undone. Some aeons hence those two skeletons, the one hanging by the foot from the other, may grace the museum of a subtropical Greenland, or astonish the students of the Spitzbergen Institute of Anatomy.
Apart from sport, there is a glamour about those circumpolar regions which must affect everyone who has penetrated to them. My heart goes out to that old, gray-headed whaling-captain who, having been left for an instant when at death’s door, staggered off in his night gear, and was found by his nurses far from his house, and still, as he mumbled, “pushing to the norrard.” So an Arctic fox, which a friend of mine endeavored to tame, escaped, and was caught many months afterwards in a gamekeeper’s trap in Caithness. It also was pushing “norrard,” though who can say by what strange compass it took its bearings? It is a region of purity, of white ice, and of blue water, with no human dwelling within a thousand miles to sully the freshness of the breeze which blows across the icefields. And then it is a region of romance also. You stand on the very brink of the unknown, and every duck that you shoot bears pebbles in its gizzard which come from a land which the maps know not.
GEORGE, MAN, ALEC’S GONE.