A Whaleman's Wife

by Frank Thomas Bullen

THE CYCLONE

Although all hands had dispersed and half of them were free to seek their berths, they could none of them go below. A great awe, not to say fear, was upon them, for none of them save the skipper and some of the officers had ever witnessed the upheaval of the sea and down-pressing of the heavens which were now imminent, and the coming thereof exercised a fearful fascination upon them. They huddled in groups, only whispering an occasional word, and waited for they knew not what. Yet all had a feeling that it must be the Trump of Doom. As yet the wind had not attained any great force, but the motion of the ship was exceedingly uneasy, for the ocean is so responsive to the power of the wind that long before a gale which is somewhere raging has reached a ship, she will often be most violently tossed by big waves coming sweeping towards her, and this without any barometrical warning that can be noticed. Nay, it sometimes happens that after several hours of anxious waiting for the expected gale, with almost every stitch in the ship close furled, the restless sea will again quiet down, the filminess will disappear from the sky, and serene weather will once more prevail: the gale has either blown itself out or has by a very well understood meteorological event been diverted from its original course into a totally new one.

None of these things, however, was known to or noticed by the crew of the Xiphias. They felt the pall above descending lower and lower until they could imagine its inky folds resting upon the mastheads; they heard the wailing and moaning of the wind, rising to an occasional wild shriek, as if impatient to begin the elemental strife; they experienced the peculiar sensation inseparable from the environment of an atmosphere surcharged with electricity; and they were obliged to hold on to keep themselves from being thrown off their feet by the unnatural, unexpected lurches of the puzzled ship. But it is fair to them to say that through all their apprehensions for the next few hours they felt most for their half-dozen shipmates in that frail boat, far away in the awful darkness, doomed to face the fiercest conflict of wind and wave known to seafarers, all unsheltered even by a little deck. Then came a new terror. The accumulation of electric fluid all around them, having become greater than the atmosphere could hold, commenced to discharge itself in blinding streaks of vari-coloured flame, which quiveringly ran about the blackness overhead and almost seemed to light up the black heaps of water rising and falling without order all around them. Every yard-arm, masthead, davit-head—in fact, every point, even to their own heads—gleamed palely with latent electricity, and strange sensations as of pricking roughened all the surfaces of their bodies. Some became numbed with fear, others wished they could be so.

And then—it was almost a relief—with a roar as of ten thousand lions mad with hunger, the full hurricane burst upon them. Where it struck them none knew, or what the ship did when she felt it; for whether she was beneath the sea or above no one could tell. The awful blast ripped off the surface of the sea, and spread it through the air so that sight, speech, almost breath became impossible. But they all noticed that, although the ship beneath their feet seemed as if she was being hurled through space, she was now quite steady; the drunken uncertain motion she had previously been suffering from had altogether ceased, for under that pressure of wind no sea could lift its head. I said there was almost a sense of relief, and this is really true, for now it did not appear possible that matters could become worse. Men’s minds refused to entertain the possibility of any increase in the force of the wind, and all felt dimly that any change now must be for the better—that the hurricane was doing its worst.

The skipper, aft by the useless wheel, with the two mates near him, endured like the rest. Having done all that was humanly possible, and commended himself and his charge to his Father, he had now but to set his teeth, bend his head, and bear in patience, awaiting without a tremor the manifestation of God’s will concerning him. There was a certain indefinite satisfaction in having his two mates near him—the same feeling that the other members of the crew had in being huddled together like sheep on the edge of a cliff when the gale howls furiously landward and sweeps the downs like the breath of a destroying angel. In fact, neither Captain Hampden nor his officers took the trouble to think now. They just let their mental powers lie dormant, having used them at the right time to the best advantage, and being quite ready to exercise them again when any good could thereby be done.

And now, what of those brave men so perilously cut off from their ship, left to themselves in the midst of such potentialities of destruction that camping out unsheltered and unarmed in the heart of an Indian jungle would have been safety itself by comparison? For a time, while the whale kept his unswerving and unfaltering rush into the blackness ahead, Mr. Pease’s energies and thought seemed solely concentrated upon the means of compassing the death of his gigantic steed—any ideas concerning his own danger or that of his crew did not seem to find admission to his mind. After satisfying himself that the whale was holding a straight course he called upon all hands to put forth a supreme effort to get up near enough to the monster, and make some feasible attempt at fatally wounding him. And they, seizing the tow-line and straining every sinew to the work, found that they could actually gain upon him a little, although the sprays coming over the bows threatened every now and then to swamp them. But gradually they found their task becoming easier, and although the thickening gloom chilled their hearts they encouraged one another with shouts of ‘There she feels it,’ ‘Hand over hand, hearties,’ ‘Walk her up to him!’ ‘He’s our whale,’ &c. And suddenly the mate yelled at the utmost strain of his lungs, ‘Lay off—lay her off, Walter; lay off, fur God’s sake!’ Nobly Walter responded; the light craft sprang off sideways under the pressure of the great steer oar and Walter’s straining muscles, and the whale’s huge flukes, brandished high in air, came down with a crash like thunder, and smote the water just a yard or two abaft the after oar. But that blow cost the whale his life. For the boat shot up alongside of him, and in towards his side withal, and at the same moment Mr. Pease, taking deliberate aim, sent a bomb-lance point blank into the great body. Almost before the muffled report from within told that the destructive weapon had exploded, a hand-lance had followed it, and slid up to its pole within the vast black mass.

Either of those terrible wounds had been sufficient to kill, and the two combined had the effect of bringing the whale to a sudden stop, when, with a long expiration, like the escaping steam from a water-loaded syren, he gasped out his life and was still, save for the easy motion communicated to his huge carcass by the waves. So sudden was his death that the usual tremendous convulsion which takes place when these leviathans die was totally absent. As soon as it was evident that he was dead, Mr. Pease, rising to the height of his responsibilities, and realising how short a time was left during which anything might be done, caused two more harpoons to be driven into the whale’s side near the first two, but bridled to the main line. Then allowing about fifty fathoms drift he cut the tow-line, and veering away to the tail succeeded with very great difficulty in getting a hole cut through its thickest part, and the end of the towline rove through it. That accomplished, the boat was hauled back again to a position midway between the whale’s tail and its head, the lines made well fast, and the men told to make themselves as comfortable as circumstances permitted by crouching low in the bottom of the boat, and arranging the sail so as to keep off just a little of the spindrift that was already beginning to fill the air.

It was now quite dark, although but little after noon; the sea was in that curiously undecided state before-mentioned, and the mate knew very well that at any moment the full power of the hurricane might burst upon them. Yet, strange as it may seem to landsmen or even ordinary sailors, he had by no means lost hope, neither had Walter. Both of them knew from long experience, and not theoretically, how splendid a breakwater is made by a dead whale. Both of them had time and time again owed their lives to the shelter afforded by one in the midst of such stupendous seas as are encountered in the Southern Ocean, where unhindered the lone sea sweeps round the globe, and consequently both felt that even in the present apparently hopeless circumstances they might yet be found living when the hurricane had passed and left the ocean bestrewn with the wreckage of many a score of noble ships. I think it is not generally known on land how magical (there is really no other word to describe it) is the power exercised by oil upon the sea. A little oil spilt upon the water during the prevalence of the roughest gale makes a tiny oasis of smoothness, around which the most gigantic waves rear their furious crests in vain in the endeavour to encroach upon it. ‘Oil upon the troubled waters’ has long been a paraphrase for the gentle work of the peacemaker, but it is much more than that—it is a scientific expression of fact; and since shipmasters (being, as I am never weary of pointing out, the most conservative of men) have taken to using oil, as it should be used, for the purpose of stilling the angry waves, the number of shipping disasters that have been averted is past all counting. It is safe to say that if, wherever any breakwater, pier, or similar structure is exposed to the fury of stormy seas, a large perforated pipe were to be laid on the sea-bed a few yards seaward of the foundations and surrounding them, through which in time of storm oil might be pumped at high pressure, we should never have any of those costly works destroyed by the impact of the waves at all; for they (the structures) would be surrounded by a ring fence of smoothness beyond which, no matter how fierce their anger, the great waves could never pass.

Now, a whale is a natural reservoir of oil, and, whether alive or dead, he always has around him an area of calm induced by the exudations from his skin. Therefore, when we read of ‘whales taking refuge in sheltered bays from the fury of gales,’ we may be held blameless for curling the lip of derision, and wondering what manner of fools they are who perpetrate such twaddle for the deluding of their readers. Also a whale when it is dead does by some mysterious volition point its head, not in the wind’s eye, or directly to the quarter from whence the wind comes, but about eight points, or forty-five degrees, therefrom, and, stranger still, does invariably drift towards the wind, and not, like a ship, away from it. Various explanations have been proffered to account for this really wonderful movement of the whale’s great carcass after death, but none of them, I think, is feasible save this: that the whale’s tail, being a huge limber piece of gristle of exquisite propulsive shape, is so actuated by the wash of the waves past the great body that its motions, like those of an oar turned in a groove at the stern of a boat, are sufficient to keep the body to which it is attached working to windward. Not, be it noted, against a current, which moves the whole mass of water, but against the wind through the water and incidentally against the sea, which is quite a different matter.

Perhaps an apology is necessary for so long a digression, when the fate of Mr. Pease and his brave men is trembling in the balance, but there are so many utterly impossible and unexplainable things to be read in stories now, written to account for the escape of the hero, that I have felt compelled to take up a little more space than usual in which to explain the entire reasonableness and possibility of escape from their dire peril which actuated and hardened Mr. Pease and his crew. A whisper had run from end to end of the boat full of hope, and Rube in the middle had accepted it with heartfelt joy, not for his own sake (for this extraordinary man never thought about himself at all), but for the sake of his shipmates. And then all settled down to wait and watch. High over them, with a most terrific noise, a blaze of unearthly light, and a peculiarly chilling sensation, burst the hurricane. Really, terrible though it was, they were immensely surprised that it was not worse. They did not, could not realise how that great bank of flesh, already floating much higher than ever it did with life in it, was protecting them, not merely from the impact of the sea, but from the swamping effect of the spindrift, the sea face carried airwards by the wind. As this came flying along it met the body of the whale, and shot upwards, just passing over the frail cockleshell riding in the little smooth to leeward. All heaven’s artillery opened out, the roar of the wind, the rumble of the thunder, the hiss of the lightning; but cowering low down in their tiny craft rocking easily in the quiet water under the lee of the whale, those six men lived. And as the hours wore on they forgot to be afraid; nay, they even slept, or hazily speculated upon what they should do when, the storm having passed, they might, and probably would, find themselves alone on that wide, wide sea, foodless and waterless. And so the hours succeeded each other, day insensibly passed into night, leathery tongues vainly roamed round parched mouths seeking moisture and finding none, and still hope lived.