We rowed to the ship and the line was carried aboard and tagged onto a winch. We got at it right then and, before long, up came the dead body of a whale. It was a good sized one—indeed, I thought at the start that it was bigger looking close beside the bark than it had seemed when we struck on.
And pretty soon we found out the reason why it seemed different. We couldn’t find the harpoon Tom Anderly had thrown into it! The line was found jammed to the back of the whale’s mouth and wound round its body—whales will roll over and over when struck just as an old salmon will when hooked.
That whale was drowned. A whale isn’t a fish, anyway, and this one had been under water so long that it was too late, as Ben Gibson said, to bring forward any “first aid to the drowned” business!
What puzzled us all—from Captain Hi down to the cook’s cat—was what had become of the iron?
“And, by jingoes!” cried the second mate, “we ain’t got all our line back.”
This was plainly a fact. When the whale was grappled onto the bark’s side and the line unwound, we found that it still hung down into the sea and was quite taut.
“This blamed critter was anchored!” growled Tom Anderly. “And he dragged his anchor at that.”
“Get onto the winch, boys,” said Captain Rogers. “Let’s see what’s hung to it now.”
We wound in the line and up came the whale that we had actually struck! The harpoon still held in its body. Good reason why I had thought the first whale seemed different from the one we had chased.
Of course, this whale was drowned, too. When it sounded, the other whale must have crossed our line while feeding with open mouth. Feeling the strange sensation of the hemp in the back of its mouth, the creature had instinctively closed its jaws and, in the struggle, wound the line about its body and been drowned.