“Look at here, Nishikanta,” he would say, his face white and his lips trembling with anger. “That’s rough stuff, and all you can get back for it is rough stuff. I know what I’m talking about. You’ve got no right to risk our lives that way. Wasn’t the pilot boat Annie Mine sunk by a whale right in the Golden Gate? Didn’t I sail in as a youngster, second mate on the brig Berncastle, into Hakodate, pumping double watches to keep afloat just because a whale took a smash at us? Didn’t the full-rigged ship, the whaler Essex, sink off the west coast of South America, twelve hundred miles from the nearest land for the small boats to cover, and all because of a big cow whale that butted her into kindling-wood?”
And Simon Nishikanta, in his grouch, disdaining to reply, would continue to pepper the last whale into flight beyond the circle of the sea their vision commanded.
“I remember the whaleship Essex,” the Ancient Mariner told Dag Daughtry. “It was a cow with a calf that did for her. Her barrels were two-thirds full, too. She went down in less than an hour. One of the boats never was heard of.”
“And didn’t another one of her boats get to Hawaii, sir?” Daughtry queried with all due humility of respect. “Leastwise, thirty years ago, when I was in Honolulu, I met a man, an old geezer, who claimed he’d been a harpooner on a whaleship sunk by a whale off the coast of South America. That was the first and last I heard of it, until right now you speaking of it, sir. It must a-been the same ship, sir, don’t you think?”
“Unless two different ships were whale-sunk off the west coast,” the Ancient Mariner replied. “And of the one ship, the Essex, there is no discussion. It is historical. The chance is likely, steward, that the man you mentioned was from the Essex.”
CHAPTER XIII
Captain Doane worked hard, pursuing the sun in its daily course through the sky, by the equation of time correcting its aberrations due to the earth’s swinging around the great circle of its orbit, and charting Sumner lines innumerable, working assumed latitudes for position until his head grew dizzy.
Simon Nishikanta sneered openly at what he considered the captain’s inefficient navigation, and continued to paint water-colours when he was serene, and to shoot at whales, sea-birds, and all things hurtable when he was downhearted and sea-sore with disappointment at not sighting the Lion’s Head peak of the Ancient Mariner’s treasure island.
“I’ll show I ain’t a pincher,” Nishikanta announced one day, after having broiled at the mast-head for five hours of sea-searching. “Captain Doane, how much could we have bought extra chronometers for in San Francisco—good second-hand ones, I mean?”
“Say a hundred dollars,” the captain answered.