I watched the thing eagerly, although I could not hope for rescue under such a guise. It was not, I was almost instantly sure, a vessel of any kind; as the Wavecrest kept on her course, which brought me directly upon the object, I was not long at a loss to identify it.
Although I had seldom been far out of sight of land myself, and had never seen any ocean creature bigger than a blackfish (not the tautog, but the pilot-whale) I had listened to the stories of old whalemen along the Bolderhead docks, and I was pretty sure that I had sighted one of those great mammals—a creature of the sea which is no more a fish than a horse or a cow is a fish, yet is the greatest wonder of marine life.
Beside, the peculiar condition of the sea immediately about the object revealed its identity. The whale was dead, I was sure. Otherwise it would not have been at the surface so long in such a gale. And being dead, and the seabirds and shark-fish having got at its carcass before the storm, there was good reason for the waves not breaking over it.
The dead whale lay in a slick, or “sleep,” as some old whalemen pronounce the word, and hope revived in my troubled mind the instant I realized what the object was, and its condition. The waves were following me as hungrily as ever; at any moment the sloop might be overwhelmed. But once let me get the Wavecrest in the lee of this dead whale, I could bid defiance to the storm. There I could outride the gale and, when it was fair again, set the sloop’s nose toward the distant mainland.
With rare good fortune the sloop needed little guidance to reach the dead whale. My original course had been aimed for the huge beast. As the Wavecrest gained upon it the monster was revealed, lying partly on its side, all of fifty feet from tail to nose. Of course there were no seabirds upon the carcass now, nor did I see the triangular fin of a shark anywhere about. They had ripped and torn at the carcass sufficiently, however, to release copiously the oil from the casing of blubber, or fat, with which the whale is entirely covered.
My Wavecrest bore down upon the becalmed circle and suddenly I found the waves heaving smoothly under the sloop instead of breaking all about her. I ran to the canvas and stowed it quickly, then brought the sloop around into the lee of the huge bulk of the whale. I had a broken-shanked harpoon and a boathook. I plunged these both into the carcass and then attached the Wavecrest, bows and stern, to these strange mooring-posts.
There she was, as safe as though we were in a landlocked harbor, rising and falling with a motion by no means unpleasant. The exuding oil made a charmed circle about the sloop, into which the agencies of the gale could not venture. The wind wailed as madly across the sea, and the sea itself, at a little distance, tumbled, and burst in a most chaotic manner; but here in the slick I lay at peace—and grateful indeed I was for this remarkable haven.
Chapter XI