“There! look yon!” he yelled. “Pull, you lubbers!”
They shot the boat ahead and the old man seized me, plunging in his arm to the shoulder as I sank again. Ben had begun to strip off his clothing, bound to dive for me if the old man missed. But there was no need of that, and they hauled me over the side into the boat a deal more dead than alive.
Indeed, I fought when they brought me back to consciousness. It was awful suffering, that recovery—that return to the world which I had every reason to suppose I had said good-bye to. It was a good half hour before I began to realize where I was, and what was happening to me.
We could not go back to the ship, however. Whale fishing is a grim business. A struck whale has completely smashed a boat, leaving its crew struggling in the water, and the other boats have gone on after the monster and left their companions to paddle about on the wreckage as best they can until the leviathan is killed.
The other boats from the Scarboro were all busy and our boat was behind. We had lost our whale and the better part of two lines had gone with the iron. Before I could do more than lie on the bottom of the boat, under the men’s feet, and gasp, we were pulling after the wounded female again. She had come up for air and lay sullenly on the surface not half a mile away.
She was a Tartar; but old Tom got another iron in her, and later Ben Gibson killed her with two bomb-pointed lances. When the old bark came down upon us about night she was dead and we hauled her alongside—the first fish to be grappled to. But the other boats brought in three more. We were having great luck and for two more days worked like Trojans.
But the school of cachelots we had followed had disappeared then. The Scarboro sailed many a league farther south—and toward the Horn—before we raised a single whale. We were 40 degrees south then—below the de la Plata. I feared that the old bark would not put in at Buenos Ayres and there would be no chance of my returning home by steamship.
Not that I was yet tired of my work and the life we led. No, indeed. But I was anxious to hear from home, and I believed letters must be waiting me there at Buenos Ayres—and money, too.
No use to think of touching port, however, when the weather was so fine and whales were so infrequently met with. The whole crew had begun to get anxious. Mr. Robbins grumbled that he didn’t see the use of roaming about the South Atlantic, anyway. It was the Pacific that whales frequented.
“Why the last time I sailed in a windjammer,” declared the mate, “we were four weeks getting around the Horn from Santiago, and there wasn’t a day went over our heads that we didn’t see plenty of whales. The minute we got onto this side of Fuego we never saw a fin—and we ran to Bahia. Wouldn’t have known there ever was a whale in this darned old ocean.”