Frequently our rower is stopped by a mass of ice which peremptorily refuses him a passage. Then comes a new expedient, the parts are changed on the instant. Hitherto the canoe has carried the man; now the man carries the canoe. He takes it on his shoulder and traverses the icy portage till he comes again to open water, the ice crackling beneath him as he crosses it. Occasionally icebergs, floating, and terrible mountains, are so close that they leave between them only a narrow passage which our man passes through at the risk of being in an instant crushed, flattened between them. Those icy walls now widen, now contract, the space between them; they may, at any moment, come together with a force that would crush a seventy-four, to say nothing about our poor Greenlander in his poor skin canoe. Such a fate did, in fact, once occur to a tall ship; she was cut in two, flattened, crushed; by the coming together of two icebergs.
These Greenlanders tell us that their ancestors were Whale fishers. They were less wretched then, more ingenious, and better provided. No doubt they had iron; procured probably from Norway or Iceland. Whales have always been very numerous in the Greenland seas. A grand object of desire to those to whom oil is a thing of the very first necessity! The fish give it by drops, the Seal in waves—the Whale in mountains! He was truly a man, and a bold one, who first, with his poor weapons, with the sea howling at his feet, and the darkness closing around him, dared to pursue the Whale! A bold man, he, who trusting to his courage, the strength of his arm and the weight of his harpoon, first believed that he could pierce that mighty mass of blubber and flesh and convert it to his own profit!—the man who first imagined that he could attack the Whale and not perish in the tempest that would be raised by the plunges and terrific tail-blows of the astonished and suffering monster! And, as if to crown his audacity, the man next fastened a line to his harpoon, and braving still more closely the frightful shock of the agonized and dying giant, never once feared that that giant might plunge headlong into the deep, taking with him harpoon, line, boat,—and man!
There is still another danger, and no less terrible. It is that instead of meeting the common Whale, our man should fall in with the Cachalot, that terror of the seas. He is not very large, perhaps not more than from sixty to eighty feet. But his head alone measures about a third; from twenty to twenty-five feet. In case of such a meeting, woe to the fisher; he would become the chased instead of the chaser, the victim instead of the tyrant. The Cachalot has horrible jaws, and no fewer than forty-eight enormous teeth; he could with ease devour all; both boat and man. And he seems always drunk with blood. His blind rage so terrifies all the other Whales that they escape, bellowing, throwing themselves on the shore, or striving to hide themselves in the sand. Even when he is dead they still fear him and will not approach his carcass. The fiercest species of the Cachalot is the Ourque or Physetene of the ancients, which is so much dreaded by the Icelanders, that when they are on the sea they will not so much as name him lest he should come and attack them. They believe, on the other hand, that a species of Whale, the Jubarte, loves and protects them, and provokes the monster in order to save them from his fury.
Many think that the first who undertook so perilous a task as that of Whale fishing must have been eccentric hot heads. According to those who think so, that perilous chase could never have originated with the prudent men of the North, but must have been initiated by the Basques, those daring hunters and fishers who were so well accustomed to their own capricious sea, the Gulf of Gascony, where they fished the Tunny. Here they first saw the huge Whales at play and pursued them, frenzied by the hope of such enormous prey, and pursued them still, onward and onward, no matter whither; even to the confines of the pole.
Here the poor Colossus fancied it must needs be safe, for it could not fancy any one would be desperate enough to follow it thither, and so it went tranquilly to sleep. But our Basque mad-caps approached it stealthily and silently. Tightening his red belt around his waist, the boldest and most active of the Basque sailors leaped from the deck right on to the back of the sleeping monster, and, fearlessly or carelessly, drove the harpoon home to the very eye. Poor Whale!
DISCOVERY OF THE THREE OCEANS.
Who opened up to men the great distant navigation? Who revealed the Ocean, and marked out its zones and its liquid highways? Who discovered the secrets of the Globe? The Whale and the Whaler!