I was the last to get the scurvy. I suppose that was because I was the youngest and healthiest on board. When it did hit me it was horrible. I felt I was dying from the outside in. I would sit for hours and peel dead skin off my body. When I look back on those days now I wonder how we ever lived through it. Scurvy seems to make savages of men at sea—they lose all sense of balance. There is nowhere to turn for help—nothing to do but suffer and wait for it to finish you. Only my father raved at the bad luck:
“It’s a goddamned shame. If I had anything but a bunch of vomitin’ landlubbers for a crew we’d be in Honolulu now.” He paced up and down the poop deck from the rail to the binnacle and back. I crouched on the hawser bit astern, picking dead skin off my arm.
“Porpoise!!”
The cry brought us all to our feet. There, close to us on the windward side was a school of about twenty porpoises diving and snorting in the spray of the bowsprit.
“All hands on deck! Man the capstan! Stand by the harpoon!”
Father rushed forward over the debris on deck. In less than five minutes every living man aboard was on the fo’c’s’le head standing by to help land a porpoise.
A porpoise is a mammal and its meat is very like that of beef. If we could land one it would furnish fresh food for a week. Father stood down on the martingale under the jibboom, harpoon in hand. We waited praying for the porpoise to come near. The thin leader line from the harpoon was fastened to a three-quarter inch rope made fast to the capstan.
So eager was I to help land the porpoise that, not realizing what I was doing, I twisted the leader line of the harpoon around my hands. A big porpoise dived under the bow. Father hurled the harpoon. It struck the porpoise amidships and sunk in deep. The porpoise let out a squeal like a stuck pig and dived.
“Play out the leader line,” called Father.
He was going to let the porpoise have plenty of rope for it couldn’t get away with a steel harpoon through it, and sooner or later that harpoon would take its life. Six fathoms of line played out quickly, and then suddenly I was jerked with a terrific force to the edge of the fo’c’s’le head. The porpoise, diving deep, had used up the slack, and I couldn’t let go of the rope twisted around my hands. Slowly it slipped as the porpoise, with its two tons of weight, pulled, and the slipped rope burned inches into my hands, cutting, burning the flesh off down to the bone. I was being dragged overboard with only my own strength against that of the maddened, dying porpoise.