I was suffocating. A gurgling spasm seized upon me. Light, and sense, and all were quenched suddenly. Life was slipping from my grasp.
Chapter XVIII
In Which We Realize the “Grind” of the Whaleman’s Life
According to Ben Gibson, they immediately gave me up for dead. The chance that my arm had not been torn away from the shoulder was small, and once thus crippled they expected the spouting blood to attract the sharks, and then—good night!
But while I remained conscious I had not even thought of those monsters; nor do I believe that a single one of the beasts came near me while I followed the whale toward the bottom of the sea.
The men in my boat were helpless. They might not aid me in the least. Nor did they know when I severed the line and started for the surface again. The weight of the hemp kept it down, although it stopped running out. Fortunately it uncoiled from my arm, or I would have been held down there and drowned.
They stared in horror over the sides of the whaleboat, trying to distinguish any moving object in the depths, and as moment after moment passed they glanced at each other and shook their heads. I was lost. They had no hope of ever even seeing me again.
And then it was that the sharp eyes of the old boat-steerer descried my arm above the surface, not many yards away.