With “Fury,” Don’s Famous Cutlass.
But there were always other nets, the one metre net, the half metre and the Blake dredge. A metre is a little over three feet. Once in the morning and once every afternoon these went over, and there was always great excitement about it. There were some fine rich hauls. [[106]]
In about the best haul there were two tubs of deep sea fish from bottom—black and queer looking, some with long pointed tails without a tail fin, some eels, black with pointed heads, and a lot of funny little fish like sharks only with bright green eyes. Many of these come to the surface with the scales all torn off or soft and peeling.
There were light pink starfish, very brittle, a few sea cucumbers, some living sponges, crabs, bright red shrimps and two or three very queer looking fish with faces like demons or bogeys with funny little electric light things sticking out in front of them on long barbels, which is what they call the long whisker-like thing.
I brought home for my collection a few specimens of this rare deep sea life. Starfish, shrimp and cyclothone, which is a small deep sea fish.
Apparently there is a great undersea plateau around Cocos. It is about six hundred fathoms [[107]]deep. Just off the edge of this it is thirteen to sixteen hundred fathoms deep.
For days we saw many ocean tunnie fish jumping near the ship, and we tried all kinds of baits and different spoons and squids to catch them. One day Mother finally got four of them by jerking a squid up and down from off the boom. They weighed from ten to fourteen pounds and it certainly was very good to have fresh fish for breakfast next morning. They are a beautiful fish, like a torpedo, or bullet shaped with lovely dark blue backs and pinkish silvery sides with four stripes below the middle line and they are very swift swimmers, moving as fast or faster than the ship, for hours at a time.
One day I was sitting on the rail preparing a fish skeleton, and suddenly there was a loud “Pwishshsh” right near me. Mack, the first mate, called out “Whale!” and I jumped up and saw him not fifteen feet away. A big black body about forty feet long. [[108]]
Another day we saw a whole school of big blackfish, a kind of small whale, and they also were right near the boat for an hour. They first look like huge slow porpoises coming slowly to the surface to breathe. They are black, with rounded snouts and a big huge, fin, something like a shark’s, on the back.
