CHAPTER XVIII
In Which Billy Topsail Joins the Whaler Viking and a School is Sighted
OF a sunny afternoon the Newfoundland coastal steamer Clyde dropped Billy Topsail at Snook's Arm, the lair of the whaler Viking: a deep, black inlet of the sea, fouled by the blood and waste flesh of forgotten victims, from the slimy edge of which, where a score of whitewashed cottages were squatted, the rugged hills lifted their heads to the clean blue of the sky and fairly held their noses. It was all the manager's doing. Billy had but given him direction through the fog from Mad Mull to the landing place of the mail-boat. This was at Ruddy Cove, in the spring, when the manager was making an annual visit to the old skipper.
"If you want a berth for the summer, Billy," he had said, "you can be ship's boy on the Viking."
On the Viking—the whaler! Billy was not in doubt. And so it came to pass, in due course of time, that the Clyde dropped him at Snook's Arm.
At half-past three of the next morning, when the dark o' night was but lightened by a rosy promise out to sea, the Viking's lines were cast off. At half speed the little steamer moved out upon the quiet waters of the Arm, where the night still lay thick and cold—slipped with a soft chug! chug! past the high, black hills; factory and cottages melting with the mist and shadows astern, and the new day glowing in the eastern sky. She was an up-to-date, wide-awake little monster, with seventy-five kills to her credit in three months, again composedly creeping from the lair to the hunt, equipped with deadly weapons of offense.
"'Low we'll get one the day, sir?" Billy asked the cook.
"Wonderful quiet day," replied the cook, dubiously. "'Twill be hard fishin'."
The fin-back whale is not a stupid, passive monster, to be slaughtered off-hand; nor is the sea a well-ordered shambles. Within the experience of the Viking's captain, one fin-back wrecked a schooner with a quick slap of the tail, and another looked into the forecastle of an iron whaler from below. The fin-back is the biggest, fleetest, shyest whale of them all; until an ingenious Norwegian invented the harpoon gun, they wallowed and multiplied in the Newfoundland waters undisturbed. They were quite safe from pursuit; no whaler of the old school dreamed of taking after them in his cockle shell—they were too wary and fleet for that.