In Which I Am a Terrified Witness of a Wonderful Phenomenon
Evening was dropping down and I was woefully hungry. Being sure that the Wavecrest was safely moored to the body of the dead leviathan, I set about correcting the need which preyed upon me. I was thankful, indeed, that I had stocked my larder so well on that last day at Bolderhead. There was plenty of water, too. I could ride out a week’s storm here beside the whale I was very sure, and then have plenty of provisions to serve me until I could beat back to the mainland.
I got out my lanterns, filled and trimmed them, and cutting steps in the side of the whale with the boat-hatchet, I mounted to the top of the great body and there stuck my oar upright in the blubber and hung a lantern to it. I was pretty sure that no vessel would pass that signal light without investigating, even in the gale.
I made a very comfortable supper indeed. I managed now to force the cabin door and closed the sliding hatch. Then I warmed the cabin well with the spirit stove, stripped off my wet clothes, and got into dry garments. I went out on deck at nine o’clock, saw that my moorings were fast and the lanterns burning brightly, and then turned in. After the uncertainties of the day and the lack of sleep suffered the night before, I slept as soundly when I now turned in on one of the bunks as ever I did in my own bed at home!
At daybreak—another drab dawning of the new day—I was up and climbed the whale for the lantern. In its place I left attached to the upright oar a shirt to flutter in the wind for a signal. I hoped that any vessel passing near enough to see my signal would stop for me. But of one thing I was sure: If it chanced that a whaling ship came within sight of the dead leviathan my peril would soon be over. This huge beast had not been long dead and it would be all clear gain to any “blubber boiler” that chanced to pass that way.
Nor was the possibility of being rescued by a whaleship so slight as it would have been a few years before. There were for two decades, few whaling barks put forth from the New England ports; but of late years there is either a greater demand for whale-oil, or the cachelot (the sperm whale) is becoming more frequently seen both in northern and southern seas, and is being hunted both by steam vessels and by the old-time whaling ships.
I didn’t know where I was—that is, my position in the North Atlantic; but I believed that I had sailed so far and so fast in the sloop that I was about midway of the course of the British steam lines running ’twixt Halifax and the Bermudas. Those two ports are between seven and eight hundred miles apart, and I suspected I was nearer one or the other than I was to Boston! I knew I had done some tall sailing since being swept out of Bolderhead Harbor.
After having cooked and eaten a hearty breakfast, despite the blowing of the gale—for dirty weather prevailed and rain swept down in torrents every hour or two—I set about making such slight repairs as I could with the tools and materials I had at hand. And while thus engaged I made a discovery that—to say the least—startled me.
Dragging over the bows of the Wavecrest was the cable by which she had been moored in Bolderhead Harbor. I had never chanced to draw it aboard. Now I did so. It was only a bit, some three or four feet long. And instead of finding it frayed and broken by the strain of the sloop as she dragged at her old anchorage, I found that the hemp had been cut sharply across. Nothing less than a knife—and a sharp one—had severed that cable when it was taut!
The appearance of the bit of rope gave me such a jolt that I sat down and stared at it. I had been quite sure that Paul Downes and his friends knew I was aboard the Wavecrest when they nailed me into the cabin. But it really never crossed my mind that they had deliberately cut the sloop adrift. But here was evidence of the crime. There was no doubting it. I had been imprisoned on the Wavecrest and then the sloop was sent on a voyage which Paul and his friends must have realized could end in nothing less than death.