“ ‘Frank, my man,’ said I to the man-of-war’s man, whom I retained on board with some of the steadiest of the men, ‘jump aft and hoist a red rag of some sort at the gaff—their own colors, you know—if it’s only to puzzle them. Stand by, carpenter, to sweep the poop when I give you the word.’ When a shot better aimed than the last struck the mizzen-rail, narrowly missing a shroud, and scattering the splinters right and left among the Arabs. Down they went on their faces, out of the way of their friends’ balls, all except Hadji, who stood it without flinching, while my hands itched, I confess, for a chance to send an ounce bullet from the barrel in my hand through his heart.
“ ‘Hurrah!’ shouted Frank from the midst of them, as up went the cook’s shirt, tacked to pieces of bamboo to give it spread. I saw them pointing their glasses at it from the veranda of the palace, and shouted to the mates to give way strong, for they were launching their rafts and a whole fleet of boats, filled with soldiers, whose spears and long match-locks glistened in the sun now rising over the rocks to the north-east. The castles and the forts began now to fire in earnest, sending their iron about the cove in every direction, though the ship in some measure shielded the boats from the few guns which bore upon them. Many balls hurtled through the air past us, but only four struck her hull, doing no particular damage. I looked at every flash to see some of the sticks go, and ten minutes more would have brought the Arabs down on us with a force which it would have been worse than useless to resist. In fact, when I saw them training their match-locks on the boats, though we were then clear of the passage in the eddy of the current, I gave up the game as lost, thinking of calling the men on board, with the desperate notion of fighting it out to the last on board, when looking over the side at the ship’s way, I saw Muscat Tom’s broad flukes and glistening back, within fifty feet of the sternmost boat. The soldiers now opened their fire to drive the men from their work—I caught the second mate’s flushed, hopeless look, as he turned his head from tugging at his steering-oar, and then the black fiend’s triumphant grin, with a malicious glance from the whites of his eyes, as much as to say: ‘you’re in for it for a good long spell, my lads’—when the sight of the whale in the desperate emergency of the case, seemed to put it into my brain what to do.
“ ‘Mr. Parker,’ I hailed, ‘have you lines and harpoons in the boats?’
“ ‘Ay, ay, sir,’ he answered, while the men looked up at the ship as if they wondered what next.
“ ‘Cast off the larboard hawser, then,’ I shouted, ‘bend irons on to the starboard one, and strike that whale. Let the other boats come alongside.’
“ ‘Ay, ay, sir,’ he answered again, just, it seemed, as he would have done had I ordered him to fasten to the moon, supposing that it had been shining to seaward. However, the five boats were alongside and hoisted up in no time, and Parker, as soon as he was up to the dodge, wild as it seemed, did the thing in true whaleman’s style, bending triple plies of the line to the hawser, driving both irons socket up in the whale’s back, as he lay like a log on the sea. For one single instant the enormous animal remained motionless, while the boat backed off from his flukes; then I saw his mighty, flexible tail, with its million stripes of freckled gray, heave up until his whole back was plainly to be seen to the dorsal fin, when down it came like a dark mass of iron, driving a cloud of spray in the air, and off he headed to sea, the water being too shallow for him to sound. The hawser stood the surge, and away the old ship went to her tug, the second mate giving a chase, while the men echoed back the yells of the disappointed Arabs amid the crack of match-locks and the bellowing thunder of the cannon. We soon had Parker’s boat towing astern, and Tom, if any thing, increased his speed, stretching the hawser—which, like the rest of her gear, was bran new that voyage, as taut as a harp-string. Every time he raised the edge of his flukes for a downward stroke of his tail, the men cheered; in fact, the fellows danced about the deck like wild men round a war-post, or negroes under a tamarind-tree; it was no manner of use to try to restrain them; while the poor devils of Arabs, with the black at their head, stood looking their last—with Allah’s name on their lips—at castle, rock and tower. However, the thought of what was lying in the cabins seemed to strike the crew all at once; and then, as they ceased capering and pitching their hats at each other, fixing their eyes upon me as one man’s, the old, desolate feelings came back to my heart all the heavier for the contrast.
“Still the whale held right on off the coast, and we had nothing but to fold our arms and look on, wondering when the tough, pliable irons would break or draw out—or looking for him to sound, which, you know, would cause us to cut the tow-line. The axe was ready in the second mate’s hands, and we were already in the strength of the current, which he took tail on, increasing his speed, of course, toward some old sleeping haunt of his, as I thought, possibly in the Gulf of Mageira, under the lee of some low island or coral reef. The oldest whaleman in the ship could not wonder enough at the strength of the monster—a hundred feet long, as he was, and more. He neither yawed nor slackened his pace, but kept straight on to double the sandy point broad on our larboard bow by this time. It was a strange thing, to be sure, to feel the ship slipping along, stern on to the current, with a man standing soberly at the wheel to steady it, all her sails furled, and the whale’s flukes kicking up a white dust ahead, like one of Loper’s screw-propellers. Parker told me a story of a vessel in the Greenland seas being towed by a ‘right whale’ for an hour and a half, in the teeth of a strong breeze, with the yards brailed aback; so that, at that rate, there was no estimating the powers of a full-grown ‘finner,’ a much larger and more powerful fish of the two; he might tow us entirely clear of the coast, provided the harpoons did not break off at the ‘withers,’ or ‘draw,’ which last, the mate said, was the way in which the matter was likely to end. Indeed, the event proved his knowledge of the habits and resources of this species, as we doubled the point safely enough, at the distance of two miles, in sight of a body of horsemen, who pulled up from their useless chase, on the very edge of the strand.
“A hundred wild thoughts of things which I had read of or seen, flashed across my mind, as I caught a view of the interminable blue expanse before me; now it was Mazeppa on his wild horse swimming the ‘bright, broad river’—now a Gaucho scouring the pampas—now the naked trapper running for life from the Blackfeet, over the plains of prickly pear—or, last of all, the voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, which coming up, as they did, from the days of my boyhood, when the wreck of the only woman I ever loved was lying thus strangely in the cabin, with the eunuch’s black face glooming over it, oppressed me like some monstrous dream. I was aroused from this by a voice calling out that there was a large ship right in the whale’s track. Accordingly, after a little we made her out with our glasses, rolling on the long ground-swell, a frigate-built ship, which I took, from the whiteness of her canvas, to be either French or American, though the leanness of her dark hull, with its single tier of guns, as she rose on the swell when we drove nearer to her, and the improbability of one of our own cruisers being upon this coast, made me almost certain she was the first. Accordingly, when we were within gunshot, up went the old Bourbon colors at the mast, as the smoke of a gun puffed out of one of her midship ports, and you had a notion what sort of a stir was on her decks at the moment, at the sight of a large ship bearing down on her in a stark calm, with more than twice her drift; then you heard the roll of her drum beating to quarters, as if they thought ’twas Sathanas himself afloat. To ease their minds, I ordered the red rag to be hauled down, and the stars and stripes to be run up at half-mast in their stead.
“All was still as death, except the surge of the Tartar’s bows to the strain of the hawser and the creak of her hamper aloft, as the whale sheered to port, and we passed within half a pistol shot of the corvette’s broadside—her crew at quarters staring at us in a queer enough sort of a way, as if catching a sight of the American flag, and the whale-boats at the cranes, they made sure all was right, strange as the sight was—until, as if to break the spell, their little mad-eyed captain jumped on the hammock-netting and hailed.
“ ‘Bon voyage au diable, mes amis!’ he shouted, waving his cap round and round, as if he meant to jerk it into the sea, to the glorification of some Yankee invention or other, the moment we slipped past him—when Hadji’s turban and the scarlet cape on the poop caught his eye, and he sung out something which I did not hear, for the whale went down like a flash, burying the Tartar’s bows to the forecastle, deep as she was, before Parker, taken by surprise, could cut the hawser, which, after all, he had no occasion to do, as you knew by the feel of the deck, as the ship rose, that the whale was free. We hauled the slack of the hawser, looking for Tom to rise, when one of the harpoons was found broken off at the head, and the other drawn out. I never saw Muscat Tom again; and it is likely, as the old hands said, that he never rose from his dive. My yarn, gentlemen,” continued the master’s mate, “is nearly spun. The frigate’s boats boarded us, of course, when part of the tale was rehearsed to her captain. He was bound to Mocha to look after some atrocities which had been committed upon subjects of France, during a recent revolt, and at once offered to land the eunuch and his men there, and to protect the Circassian, and carry her back with him to France. However, when we entered the cabin, it was found that she was beyond the reach of mortal arm, whether to shield or destroy. She lay by the side of her lover, dead by poison, as it seemed, yet still so beautiful in death as to surprise the Frenchman. In the end he took charge of all the prisoners, as the crew of the Tartar in a body stoutly refused to do duty while Catherton remained in the ship. The French captain promised to hand him over to the American authorities on the first occasion that offered, and the remainder of the day was spent in clearing up the cabins and taking depositions in French and English.