At low tide the shore would be lined with these birds vainly trying to fill themselves with shellfish and such carrion as the waters had left. It couldn’t be called feeding; a Pacific-coast gull does not feed, it seeks simply to fill up the vast, unfathomable space within. Eternity is, of course, without end, but the nearest approach to eternity must be the inside of a gull; I would say stomach, but a stomach implies metes and bounds, and there is no proof that there are any metes and bounds inside of a gull. It was good entertainment to see the coyotes come down and manœuvre to catch the gulls. There was a plain hard beach, perhaps a quarter of a mile wide, between coyote and gull. Of course coyote couldn’t walk across this and eat gull up. So he went to work to create an impression in gull’s mind that he was thereon other business, and was quite indifferent, if not oblivious, to all gulls. He would commence making long straight laps of half a mile on the beach. At the end of each lap he would turn and run back a few feet nearer gull; back another lap, another turn, and so on. But he wasn’t looking for a gull. He didn’t know there was a gull in the world. He had some business straight ahead of him which banished all the gulls in the world from his mind. He kept forgetting something and had to run back for it. And the gull on the water’s edge, trying to fill its void where men imagined a stomach to be, had no fears of that coyote. It realized the momentous and all-absorbing character of coyote’s business. There was no danger. So coyote, getting a little nearer and a little nearer at each turn, suddenly shot out of his lap at a tangent, and another gull was forever relieved of the impossible task of trying to fill itself.
CHAPTER VIII.
WHALING IN MARGUERITA BAY.
Marguerita Bay lies on the Mexican coast about 200 miles north of Cape St. Lucas. On arriving the schooner was “kedged” up the lagoons running parallel with the coast fully one hundred miles. This took two weeks. We passed, as it were, through a succession of mill-ponds, filled with low, green islands, whose dense shubbery extended to the water’s edge. The trunks of a small umbrella-shaped tree were washed by the tides to the height of several feet, and thickly incrusted with small oysters. When we wanted oysters we went on shore and chopped down a boatload of trees. Is it necessary to remark that the trees did not grow the oysters. The oysters grew on the trees, and they were as palatable as so many copper cents, whose taste they resembled. When cooked, the coppery taste departed. The channel through these lagoons was very crooked. It was necessary to stake out a portion at low water, when it ran a mere creek through an expanse of hard sand, sometimes a mile from either shore. At high water all this would be covered to a depth of six or seven feet. The Henry grounded at each ebb, and often keeled over at an angle of forty-five. From our bulwarks it was often possible to jump on dry ground. This keeling-over process, twice repeated every twenty-four hours, was particularly hard on the cook, for the inconvenience resulting from such a forty-five-degree angle of inclination extended to all things within his province. My stove worked badly at the angle of forty-five. The kettle could be but half-filled, and only boiled where the water was shallowest inside. The cabin table could only be set at an angle of forty-five. So that while the guests on the upper side had great difficulty in preventing themselves from slipping off their seats on and over that table, those on the lower side had equal difficulty in keeping themselves up to a convenient feeding distance. Captain Reynolds, at the head of the board, had a hard lot in the endeavor to maintain his dignity and sitting perpendicularly at the same time on the then permanent and not popular angle of forty-five. But I, steward, butler, cook, and cabin boy, bore the hardest tribulation of all in carrying my dishes across the deck, down the cabin stairs, and arranging them on a table at an angle of forty-five. Of course, at this time the rack used in rough weather to prevent plates and platters from slipping off was brought into permanent use. Transit from galley to cabin was accomplished by crawling on two legs and one arm, thus making of myself a peripatetic human triangle, while the unoccupied hand with difficulty bore aloft the soup-tureen. It was then I appreciated the great advantages afforded in certain circumstances by the prehensile caudal termination of our possible remote ancestors. With such a properly equipped appendage, the steward might have taken a close hitch round an eyebolt, and let all the rest of himself and his dishes safely down into the little cabin. It is questionable whether man’s condition has been physically improved by the process of evolution. He may have lost more than he has gained. A monkey can well afford to scorn the relatively clumsy evolutions of the most skilful human brother acrobat.
Marguerita Bay was the nursery of the female whales, or in whaler’s parlance, “cows.” The long, quiet lagoons, fringed with green, their waters warmed by the sun to a most agreeable temperature, were the resort during the spring months of the mother whales to bring forth and nurse their young. The bulls generally remained outside. The cows were killed with tolerable ease in the shoal waters of the bay. Outside they have, on being struck, the reputation of running out all the line a boat can spare and then demanding more. Grant could never have fought it out on one line with a “California Gray.” In the lagoons, so long as the calf was uninjured, the mother would slow her own pace, so as to remain by her young. Thus she became an easy sacrifice. If the calf was wounded, woe to the boat’s crew. The cow seemed to smell the blood the moment it was drawn from its offspring. The first time this happened—the boat-steerer accidentally slipping his lance into the calf—the cow turned and chased the boat ashore. The tables were turned. The miserable pigmies, who dared strike Leviathan’s child, were saved because their boat could float where Mrs. Whale couldn’t. She drew at least seven feet of water. A whale is one of the few things read of that is bigger than it looks. The pigmies hauled the boat upon the beach, while the whale for full half an hour swam to and fro where her soundings were safe, and embargoed them. It was, with her, “Come off if you dare.” But they didn’t care to dare, and finally she went away unkilled. She managed, at the start to give the boat one crack, enough to fill it with water. But whaleboats are made to be broken. A few hours’ work and the insertion of a few bits of wood in the light clinker-built sides will restore a whaleboat which, to an inexperienced eye, looks fit only for kindling-wood. A whale is much more of an animal than people generally imagine. There’s a great deal of affection somewhere in that big carcass. I have seen them close aboard from the schooner’s deck play with their young and roll and thrash about in mammoth gambols. They knew the doors to these lagoons leading out into the ocean as well as men know the doors to their houses. When struck, though miles distant, they made straight for that door, and if not killed before reaching it they escaped, for no boat, when fast, could be towed through the huge Pacific breakers. Pigmy man in such case sullenly cut his line and sulkily rowed back to his crowded little schooner to growl at the cook.
We filled up in six weeks. Our luck was the envy of the eleven other vessels in Marguerita Bay. This luck was mainly due to “Black Jake,” a huge Jamaica negro, with the face of a Caliban, the arm of a Hercules and a stomach greater than an ostrich’s for rum. When we left San Francisco he had a tier of twenty-five bottles, full, stored under his bunk, and not a soul was ever the wiser for it until all were emptied. He kept his own head level, his own counsel, and lying in his berth in the early evening hours of his watch below, would roll over, turn his back to the noisy, chattering Kanaka audience of the forecastle, and put the bottle, but not to his neighbors’ lips. He was king of the forecastle, king of the Kanaka crew, and king of the whaleboat when after a “muscle-digger.” He could throw a harpoon twice as far as an ordinary man, and it was to this force of muscle, added to a certain knack of his own in working up to the “grayback,” before striking, and managing the boat after, that we owed our successful voyage. Great was his fame as a whale-killer in Marguerita Bay. Many were the offers made by masters of other vessels to bribe him from us. He remained true to us. Hard were the knocks the cows gave their boats and sometimes their crews. One well-appointed schooner lying near us had her boats stove twenty-six times during our stay. Twelve men out of the fleet were more or less injured. “Dese yere whale,” Jake would remark to his audiences in the night yarns when one or two other boats’ crews from other vessels came on board, “dey aint’ like oder whales. Dar ways are ’culiar, and ye got to mind sharp how ye get onto ’em.” But nobody ever solved Jake’s “’culiar way o’ getting onto ’em.”
A harpoon was not a toasting-fork to throw in the days when men oftener threw the iron by muscle instead of powder. It is a shod, with a heavy wooden pole five or six feet in length fastened into the socket of the iron barb. This, with the line attached, makes a weight requiring for the cast the use of both arms, and strong arms at that. A man would not care to carry a harpoon more than a mile in a hot day. Its own weight, as much as the impelling force, is depended on to bury itself in the floating mound of seemingly polished India-rubber which constitutes a whale above water. And when it first buries itself, there is for a few seconds some vicious splashing and ugly flirting of fluke or fin. A whale’s tail is an instrument of offence of about one hundred horse power, and well adapted to cutting through a boat as a table knife goes through an egg shell. The two fins suggest members between paddles and rudimentary arms. It is also a member very capable of striking out from the right or left shoulder, and striking very hard. When a half-dozen men are within six feet of these weapons, controlled by an enormous black sunken mass, eighty or one hundred feet long, they are apt to look a trifle wild and their eyes have a tendency to bulge. There are stories among whalemen of boat-steerers who have had all the grit permanently taken out of them by the perils and catastrophes of that moment. A New Londoner once had the cap swept from his head by the sweep of the whale’s tail over it, and he was too nervous for boat service ever afterward. It is no skulking fight, like shooting lions and tigers from the shelter of trees or rocks. It’s a fair standup combat between half a dozen men in an egg-shell of a boat on the open sea, and sometimes on heavy ocean billows, and 500 tons of flesh, bone, and muscles, which, if only animated by a few more grains of sense, could ram the whaleship herself as effectually as an ironclad. As a murderous spectacle the capture and killing of a whale, as seen even by a sea-cook from the galley window, is something ultra-exciting. It makes one’s hair stand upon both ends.
There is the whaleboat, the men sitting motionless in their seats, the long oars apeak, shooting through the water, towed by the whale unseen underneath the surface. Sometimes two or three boats hitch on, for the more the whale has to drag the sooner he becomes exhausted. Now they haul in on him and carefully coil the wet line in the tubs. Closer and closer they near him, the passage of the great mass under water being marked by swirls and eddies on the surface. Our herculean king, “Black Jake,” is at the bow, the round, razor-edged, long-handled lance lying by him, his back to the crew, his eye on the eddies, his great bare black arms, now the right, now the left—moving first in one direction, then another, as thus he signals to the steersman the direction in which to keep the boat’s head; for although we are being towed as a tug would tow a skiff, we must be kept as near as possible in a line with the submerged motive power, and then, with a swash and snort, out of the water six feet ahead comes twenty, may be forty feet of that great black mass! It is astonishing how much there is of him. And he is down and under, with his great gulp of air, in less time than it takes to write or even speak these last twenty words, but not before the lance is out of Jake’s hands, driven three feet into his side, and hauled aboard again by the light, strong line attached. Suddenly the whale line slacks. The boat ceases its rush through the water. The eddy and swirl ahead cease. Now look out for squalls. This is one of Mrs. Grayback’s peculiar tricks. She is ambushed somewhere below. She designs coming up under the boat’s bottom, and constituting herself into a submarine island of flesh, bobbing up like a released cork. She is resolving herself into a submarine earthquake, and proposes to send that boat and crew ten feet into the air, or capsizing them off her India-rubber back. One hundred or five hundred tons of wicked intelligence is thus groping about in the unseen depths for the purpose of attaining the proper position, and, as it were, exploding herself like an animated torpedo. Every seat in the boat is an anxious seat. There is no talking, but a great deal of unpleasant anticipation. Those who have seen the thing done before, await in dread suspense the shock and upset. It’s very much like being over a powder-magazine about to explode. To keep up the interest let us leave his particular boat and situation in statu quo. Your imagination may complete the catastrophe or not, as you choose. Final consummations are not desirable in a thrilling tale, and this tale is meant to be thrilling. Therefore, if you’ve got a thrill in you, please thrill.
From the schooner’s deck, a mile and a half away, Captain, cook, and cooper—the head, tail, and midriff of the ship’s company—we perceive that the white puff of spray from the whale’s blowholes has changed to a darker color. “Spouting blood,” we remark. The boat is lying quite near by. At intervals of a few minutes a circular streak of white water is seen breaking the smooth surface of the lagoon. He’s in his “flurry.” He is dying. It is a mighty death, a wonderful escape of vitality and power, affection, and intelligence, too, and all from the mere pin’s prick of an implement in the hands of yon meddlesome, cruel, audacious, greedy, unfeeling pigmies. Spouting blood, bleeding its huge life away, shivering in great convulsions, means only for us forty barrels more of grease, and a couple of hundred pounds of bone to manufacture death-dealing, rib-compressing, liver-squeezing corsets from. And all the while the calf lingers by the dying mother’s side, wondering what it is all about. Dead and with laborious stroke towed to the vessel, the calf swims in its wake. Made fast alongside, its beautifully symmetrical bulk tapering from head to tail in lines which man copies in the mould of his finest yachts, the body remains all night, and in the still hours of the “anchor watch” we can hear the feeble “blow” of the poor calf, as it swims to and fro.
In the morning the mass which last night was but a couple of feet out of water, has swollen and risen almost to the level of the low bulwark’s top, while the gas generated by the decomposition within escapes from each lance puncture with a faint sizzle. With the earliest light the crew are at work. Skin and fat are torn off in great strips and hoisted on board. Round and round the carcass is slowly turned, with each turn another coil of blubber is unwound and cut off. The sharks are busy, too. Monsters (I use the term “monsters” merely for the sake of euphony, not liking to repeat the word “shark” so often) fifteen and eighteen feet long rush up to the carcass, tear off great pieces of the beefy-looking flesh and then quarrel with each other for its possession, flirting the water with nose and fin, and getting occasionally a gash from a sharp whale-spade which would take a man’s head off. Amid all this, men shouting, swearing, singing, the windlass clanking, fires under the try-pots blazing, black smoke whirling off in clouds, sharks grabbing and fighting and being fought, the motherless calf still swims about the mutilated carcass, and when cast adrift, a whity-yellowish mass of carrion, swept hither and thither by wind and tide, it still keeps it company until dead of starvation or mercifully devoured by the “monsters.” Madame, every bone in your corset groans with the guilt of this double murder.
After a whale had been “cut in,” or stripped of his blubber, an operation somewhat resembling the unwinding of a lot of tape from a long bobbin, the whale answering for the bobbin as he is turned round and round in the water, and the blubber for the tape as it is windlassed off, the whity-yellowish, skin-stripped carcass was then cast adrift, and it floated and swelled and smelled. Day after day it swelled bigger and smelled bigger. It rose out of the water like an enormous bladder. It would pass us in the morning with the ebb tide and come back with the flood. A coal-oil refinery was a cologne factory compared to it. Sometimes two or three of these gigantic masses would be floating to and fro about us at once. Sometimes one would be carried against our bows and lodge there, the rotten mass lying high out of the water, oozing and pressing over our low bulwarks on deck. We had a fight with one of these carcasses for half an afternoon trying to pry it off with poles, oars, and handspikes. It was an unfavorable mass to pry against. Of course it smelt. For a dead mass it was extremely lively in this respect. There are no words in which to describe a powerful smell so closely as to bring it to the appreciation of the senses. It is fortunate there are none, for some talented idiot to make his work smell and sell would be certain to use them. The gulls used to navigate these carcasses on their regular trips up and down the lagoons. They served these birds as a sort of edible ferry-boat. You might see forty or fifty feeding and sailing on a single carcass. But they seemed downcast—the dead whale was too much for them. Not that they ever got full of the carrion, but they exhausted themselves in the effort. The supply was unlimited; ditto the void within the gull, but there were limits to his strength.