“Blo-o-w! bl-o-o-w!”
And from the throats of three hundred natives came a roar “Te folau! te folau!” (“A whale! a whale!”)
The skipper and his boat-steerer sprang to their feet and looked seaward, and there, less than a mile from the shore, was a mighty bull cachalot, leisurely making his way through the glassy sea, swimming with head up, and lazily rolling from side to side as if his one hundred tons of bulk were as light as the weight of a flying-fish.
“Now, mister, you shall see what Walter and I can do with that fish,” cried the skipper to me. “And when we've settled him, and the other boats are towing him off to the ship, Walter and I will come on shore again and hev something to eat—if you will invite us.”
The boat flashed out from the beach, swept out of the passage through the reef, and in twenty minutes was within striking distance of the mighty cetacean. And, watching from the verandah, I saw the young harpooner stand up and bury his first harpoon to the socket, following it instantly with a second. Then slowly sank the huge head, and up came the vast flukes in the air, and Leviathan sounded into the ocean depths as the line spun through the stem notch, and the boat sped over the mirror-like sea. In ten minutes she was hidden from view by a point of land, and the last that we on the shore saw was “the dandiest lad that ever stood up in a boat's bow” going aft to the steer-oar, and the old white-headed skipper taking his place to use the deadly lance. And then at the same time that the captain's boat disappeared from view, I noticed that the Asia had lowered her four other boats, which were pulling with furious speed in the direction which the “fast” boat had taken.
“Something must have gone wrong with the captain's boat,” I thought.
Something had gone wrong, for half an hour later one of the four “loose” boats pulled into the beach, and the old skipper, with tears streaming down his rugged cheeks, stepped out, trembling from head to foot.
“My dandy boy, my poor boatsteerer,” he said huskily to me—“that darned whale fluked us, and near cut him in half. Poor lad, he didn't suffer; for death came sudden. An' he is the only son of his mother. Can I bring him to your house?”
Very tenderly and slowly the whaleboat's crew carried the crushed and mutilated form of the “dandiest boy” to the house, and whilst I helped the Asia's cooper make a coffin, Teveiva sat outside with the heartbroken old skipper, and spoke to him in his broken English of the Life Beyond. And so Walter Tallis, the last of an old Dorset family, was laid to rest in the little isle in the quiet lagoon.
For two days our schooner lay in sight of the island; and then, as midnight came, the blue sky became black, and the ship was snugged down for the coming storm. The skipper sent up a rocket so that it might be seen by the people on shore—to verify my prophecy about a change in the weather.