“Shove off! Up sail! Out oars! Pull ahead!” were the orders from Mr. Braxton, the officer of the larboard boat, in rapid succession. “Let’s get clear of the ship. Come, bear a hand with that sail, do,” he added, coaxingly, with his eye on the third mate’s boat. “Don’t let ’em get in ahead of us.”
“All right, sir; here you go, sheet,” replied Vera, the harpooner, a well-developed and intelligent American-Portuguese, with his accustomed good spirits.
Hastily laying aside his paddle, like a tiger couchant, with eager eyes upon his prey, he picked up his harpoon, and stood erect, his tall, muscular frame swaying above the head of the boat. He placed his thigh in the clumsy-cleat,—a contrivance to steady the harpooner against the motions of the waves,— and with his long, springy arms turned and balanced the harpoon-pole previous to poising the instrument in the air.... Under the motive power of sail and paddle the space between the boat and whale was rapidly diminishing, and apparently they would soon come into collision. The enormous head of the cetacean, as it plowed a wide furrow in the ocean, and the tall column of vapor rising from the blow-holes, as it spouted ten or twelve feet in the air, were to be seen right ahead; the expired air, as it rushed like steam from a valve, could be heard near by; the bunch of the neck and the hump were plainly visible as they rose and fell with the swell of the waves; and the terrible commotion of the troubled waters, fanned by the gigantic flukes, left a swath of foaming and dancing waves clearly outlined upon the surface of the sea....
Mr. Braxton laid the boat off gracefully to starboard, and the mastodonic head of a genuine spermaceti whale loomed up on our port bow. The junk was seamed and scarred with many a wound received in fierce and angry struggles for supremacy with individuals of its own species, or perhaps with the kraken; the foaming waters ran up and down the great shining black head, exposing from time to time the long, rakish under-jaw; but what small eyes!
“Now!” shouted the officer, as if Vera was a half-mile off, instead of about twenty-five feet. “Give him some, boy! Give him—!” But his well-trained and faithful harpooner had already darted the harpoon into the glistening black skin just abaft the fin; the boat was enveloped in a foam-cloud—the “white water” of the whalemen, stirred up by the tremendous flukes of the whale.
“Stern all!” shouted the officer; and the boat was quickly propelled backward by the oarsmen, to clear it from the whale. “Are you fast, boy?”
“Fust iron in, sir; can’t tell second,” replied Vera; but the zip-zip-zip of the line as it fairly leaped from the tub and went spinning round the loggerhead and through the chocks, sending up a cloud of smoke produced by friction, indicated the presence of healthy game.
“Wet line! wet line!” shouted Mr. Braxton, as he went forward to kill the whale, and Vera came aft to steer the boat, unstepping the mast on his way; for all whales are now struck under sail. The whale, however, soon turned flukes, and went head first to the depths below. Meantime, the other whales had taken the alarm, and with their noses in the air, were showing a “clean pair of heels” to windward.
The boat lay by awaiting the “rising” of the cetacean. Twenty minutes passed, twenty-five, stroke-oarsman began to feel hungry; thirty, thirty-five, and still the line was either slowly running out or taut; but soon it began to slacken. “Haul line! haul line!” said the officer, peering into the water. “He’s stopped.” The line was retrieved as fast as possible and carefully laid in loose coils on the after platform. “Haul line, he’s coming! Coil line clear, Vera!” said Mr. Braxton, shading his eyes with his hand and looking over the gunwale at an immense opaque spot beginning to outline itself in the depths below.
