This digression, which is hardly unnecessary, I think, is merely to while away the long wait while the ship creeps up to the spot where the happily unconscious monsters are pursuing their placid way. At last the voice of the skipper is heard again, saying—
“Lower away, Mr. Winsloe, you’re less than two miles off now. Pull straight ahead for ten minutes and then set sail. They’re just up and headin’ as near No’the as makes no odds.”
“Aye, aye, sir, lower it is,” came the ready response; and with a musical whir of soft Manilla rope over patent sheaves the four boats almost simultaneously took the water, the crews slid down the falls after them and dropped into their places, shoved off, out oars and away.
It is a stirring sight, the departure of boats after a whale from a ship. Every man seems so bent upon distinguishing himself. The flexible ashen oars spring as the weight of the body is thrown upon them, entering the water cleanly, noiselessly, gripping it firmly and leaving it as gently as if there had been no force behind the stroke. The feather is perfect—you cannot pull in a sea way without it, under pain of a bad chest blow, and the thickly padded rowlocks give no sound. Suddenly the mate’s boat, leading, gave the signal by shipping the oars and setting sail and immediately all the crews followed the example, and the big masts were stepped, the white sails shaken out to the gentle breeze, and without a sound the graceful craft slipped through the water towards the still unconscious objects of their efforts.
Etiquette demands that the boats shall follow in order of official precedence, but upon nearing the school that order is usually broken up entirely by the movements of the whales and it is then a case for individual smartness to assert itself. So now, just as the mate had indicated by a wave of his hand that the boats must spread out fanwise, a huge bull whale, the apparent monarch of the school, rose placidly a couple of boat’s lengths ahead of C. B. He rose, gripping his iron and jamming his left thigh in the “clumsy cleat” groove, cut out of the little fore deck of the boat for that purpose. Hardly had he poised the heavy weapon when the great back before him rounded upwards like a bow—sure warning that the whale was about to seek the depths.
There was a swift movement of the sinewy arms and the iron flew to its mark at the same moment as Mr. Merritt yelled—
“Now then, let him have it!”
Everybody in the boat saw the iron strike, sink in halfway and bend over as the massive iron-wood pole, weighted additionally with the line, sank downwards. But C. B. snatching his second harpoon sent it whizzing after the first, striking the arrested monster’s side about three feet away from the first wound.
Mr. Merritt swung the boat up into the wind, shouting as he did so—
“Down with the mast, lively now, hump yerselves,” and all hands sprang to the task, while the stricken whale, in a paroxysm of mingled terror and fury, lashed the quiet sea into boiling foam with his gigantic struggles against this unseen, unknown enemy that had so sorely wounded him. But none of his efforts, tremendous as they were, had any intelligent direction; they were just a blind waste of energy, and so the toiling men were able to get the sail rolled up and secured, the mast unshipped and fleeted aft, where, with its heel tucked under the after thwart, it was completely out of the workers’ way, leaving the boat clear for action. Then, as coolly as if on a pleasure trip and entirely unheeding the frantic wallowings of the leviathan so near, Mr. Merritt and C. B. changed ends, the former’s place now being in the bow, for the purpose of using the lance on the whale, while the harponeer steered.