Directing Snowball to bring after him some of the pieces of blubber,—which, in cutting out the harpoon, had been detached from the carcass,—Ben proceeded towards the tail. Here and there as he advanced, with the sharp edge of the harpoon blade; he cut out a number of holes in the spongy skin, in order to give both himself and his follower a more sure footing on the slimy surface.
At the point where he intended to take his stand,—close in by the “crutch” of the cachalot’s tail-fin,—he made three excavations with more care. At length, satisfied with his preparations, he stood, with pointed harpoon, waiting for we of the sharks to come within striking distance. They “fought shy” at first; but the old whaleman knew a way of overcoming their shyness. It only required that “chunk” of blubber, held in the hands of Snowball, to be thrown into the water, and simultaneous with the plunge a score of sharks would be seen rushing, open-mouthed, to seize upon it.
This in effect was precisely what transpired.
The blubber was dropped into the sea, close as possible to the carcass of the whale,—the sharks came charging towards it,—nearly twenty of them. The same number, however, did not go back as they had come; for one of them, impaled by the harpoon of Ben Brace, was dragged out of his native element, and hauled up the well-greased incline towards the highest point on the carcass of the cachalot.
There, notwithstanding his struggles and the desperate as well as dangerous fluking of his posterior fins, he was soon despatched by the axe, wielded with all the might and dexterity which the Coromantee could command.
Another shark was “hooked,” and then despatched in a similar fashion; and then another and another, until Ben Brace believed that enough shark-flesh had been obtained to furnish the Catamaran with stores for the most prolonged voyage.
At all events, they would now have food—such as it was—to last as long as the water with which the hand of Providence alone seemed to have provided them.