Loading the harpoon-gun. “The charge is 300 to 375 drams of very coarse, black powder which is ... rammed home from the muzzle; then come wads of okum, hard rubber or cork, after which the harpoon ... is hammered solidly into place.”
Before we left the station, the harpoon-gun had not been loaded. The muzzle was plugged with a wooden block and the iron rope-pan drawn upward and tied against the gun’s support. When coming in from the last trip the vessel had encountered heavy weather, and the rope was taken off the pan to prevent it from being carried away by a wave and fouling the propeller. Now as we were nearing the feeding grounds, the Bo’s’n went forward to load the gun, re-coil the harpoon line, and see that all was clear and running smoothly.
The men on board were greatly interested in my camera and anxious that opportunities might be given for pictures. For two hours, with the Chief Engineer and the Mate, I sat aft on the great coil of towing line, used only in very heavy weather, listening to stories of the idiosyncrasies of whales, especially humpbacks. Their firm conviction was that one—never could guess what a “hump” was going to do—except that it would be exactly what was least expected.
The Engineer had just finished telling about a big fellow that a few days before had come up in front of the ship and swam towards it with his enormous mouth wide open, when the man in the barrel called down, “Whales on the port bow!”
I jumped as though a bomb had been exploded and grabbed my camera. The other men took things rather quietly, for the whales were still a long way off. The Captain tried to show me the spouts but it was several minutes before I could distinguish the white columns of vapor shooting up every few seconds.
Model of a humpback whale in the American Museum of Natural History. The model was prepared by Mr. James L. Clark, under the direction of Dr. F. A. Lucas.
There were three of them—all humpbacks. On the instant, the dark bodies slowly rounded into view and three huge, propeller-like tails were smoothly lifted out of the water, elevated vertically to the surface, and again drawn below. It is impossible to describe the ease and beauty of the dive. To look at the heavy body and long, ungainly flippers of a humpback one would hardly suspect that there could be grace in any movement, and yet the enormous animals slide under the surface as smoothly as a water bird.
“The man in the barrel called down, ‘Whales on the port bow!’”