“Now your letters will be picked up by a London, or Lisbon-bound steamer and it won’t be two months before your folks will know all about you,” Ben Gibson said. “If you’d had to depend upon the post-box in the Straits of Magellan, for instance, it might be six months before Bolderhead folk would ever know what had become of you.”
I must confess that every day I was becoming more and more enamored of this life at sea. We had had little fair weather and were kept busy making sail and then reefing again, or repairing the small damages made by the gale. Captain Rogers was not the man to lay hove to in any fair breeze. We outran the bad weather before we crossed the line and then the lookout went to the masthead and from that time on, as long as I was with the Scarboro, the crowsnest was never empty by day.
For we had come into those regions of the South Atlantic where schools of the big mammals for which we hunted might be at any time come upon, especially at this season of the year. The gale having left us, the weather was charming. While winter was threatening New England we were in the latitude of perpetual summer, and as long as the trade wind blew we did not suffer from the heat.
The Scarboro carried crew enough to put out six boats at a time and still leave a boatkeeper and cook aboard. As a usual thing, however, only four boats were expected to be out at once—the captain’s, Ben Gibson’s (with whom Tom Anderly went as boat-steerer and would really be in charge until Ben learned the ropes) the mate’s boat, and Bill Rudd, the carpenter’s, boat. The gun forward in the Scarboro’s bows, however, was there for a purpose, too, as I found out on the first day we sighted a whale.
The man in the crowsnest suddenly hailed the deck, when Mr. Gibson was in charge:
“On deck, sir!” he sang out, with such eagerness that the watch came instantly to attention.
“Well, sir?” cried Ben.
“Ah-h blows! Again, sir!”
“Pass the word for Cap’n Rogers, Webb,” the second mate said to me, and grabbing his glasses he started up the backstays to see the sight. Some of the hands sprang into the rigging, too, and soon the whaler’s battle-cry rang through the ship:
“Ah-h blows! And spouts!”