Tom Brandy and I would sit for hours on the bulwarks, which I used to call a fence, looking at the sea. The flying fish knew far better than to come on board the vessel during the day, but there always was something or other to be seen in the ocean. At times, especially on calm days, it would be a shoal of silvery whitebait. And such a shoal! Oh, Tabby, it would have made your mouth water to look upon it. We could see first far ahead of us, a dark patch upon the bright blue water, and when we came nearer, that part of the sea would be all a-quiver, as if it were raining hard there and nowhere else. But soon the shoal opened out in all its beauty of silvery life and loveliness. I’m not a post, only a Persian cat, else I could describe it better.
“Oh, rats!” cried Warlock, “never mind the poetry.”
Another sight we used to see would be a shoal of dolphins.
“Chasing the whitebait, I suppose?” This from Warlock.
“I didn’t say so, Warlock.”
But very prettily they used to come along on the top of the water. They would be so far away at first that they looked like tiny black ticks on the horizon, but soon they were near enough to us, and we saw that they were monsters. Oh, a hundred times as large as you, Warlock, or all of us put together. They came up head first, and went down head first, just skylarking and playing and skipping like lambs on the leas. And the water all around them was lashed into foam. Wasn’t I afraid, did you ask me, Vee-Vee? No, not a bit, because Tom told me they were as harmless as cows.
But, my children, there were creatures in that deep sea of turquoisine that were very far indeed from being harmless. These were the sharks.
There were always one or two down there that the doctor led. They used to know the doctor, and floated alongside the ship, while he threw down pieces of fat to them, and sometimes a ham bone.
The doctor said those tigers of the ocean used to swallow whatever was thrown overboard, even if it were only an empty medicine bottle.
Sometimes they looked very lovingly at the doctor, and this officer would tell me they were asking him to throw over a cat for them to swallow. They said they had never eaten cat, but felt sure that it must taste very nice indeed.