The words amount to this: that in love, the eyes are as eloquent as the lips.
We have to play and hum tunes to keep our minds off the deep sea roll, that after the stillness of the ice comes as almost too much of a good thing.
CHAPTER XXXVI
To-day it is almost rough, a fresh north-east breeze, and as our little ship rolls far and often in a swell, or anything like a sea, strong men turn pale and say they feel a little tired and will go and lie down.
Killers appeared at middag-mad, and but for the excusable lassitude of our party we might have tried for one, even though it is a little rough for accurate harpooning. Their great black fins, “gaff-topsails,” sailor-men call them, cut through the water with a spirt of foam like a destroyer’s bow. Some say they use their dorsal fin as a weapon with which to attack large whales from underneath (Balænoptera and Mysticetus), but I do not believe this, for it is not sufficiently firm to do harm.
Some have higher fins than others. I feel afraid to mention the length I have seen them myself, or to quote the height another observer has given to me; but I think we may say eight feet and be well on the safe side. Others are only about two or three feet. In the Antarctic ice I have often seen them going along the edge of a floe, and our men stated that with this fin they pulled the seals off the edge of the ice into the water, but verily I do not believe them. The same men vowed that the Cape pigeon, which they saw for the first time in their lives, a chequered black and white petrel (Daption capensis), was a cuckoo. They were quite sure of this, for one of these Dundonian whalers had once spent a summer on shore and had seen a cuckoo! That was in the memorable year when he saw ripe corn for the first time.
Another excuse we make to ourselves for not pursuing these whales is that they do not have very much blubber; still, if we fall in with them again in little quieter water when we all feel fit, we may take some. When you get fast to one of these killers the others hang round till their companion is quite dead, much as sperm whales do, and even try to help their harpooned friend to freedom by giving him a shoulder on either side. Bottle-nose whales do the same, so when you get one on a line you run it till you secure some of the others. Big finners generally bolt in a great hurry and leave their harpooned relatives to look after themselves, excepting young finners in apron-strings, which will also hang round the parent.
Dr W. S. Bruce told me that when he was on H.S.H. the Prince of Monaco’s yacht with a boat’s crew they tackled one of these killers, and the unwounded killers came so close to the boat they could touch them with their hands. What must have been most interesting and instructive was the fact that the skipper who did the harpooning had been a Peterhead whaler and he knew all the expressions appropriate to the first rush of a whale in four languages—Scots, English, French and Italian—and he used them all. These killers run to twenty or thirty feet. With really big whales, heavy harpoon, big gun and huge lines, the whole business is so gigantic and awe-inspiring that men are silent, breathlessly so! But with lighter tackle somehow or other there is usually a good deal of small talk. This killer thrasher grampus or Orca gladiator, Tyrannus balænarum, has great teeth and eats whales piecemeal, porpoise, seals, and, some say, his own kind.
An accepted Danish authority, Eschricht, declared he opened a killer, and it contained the remains of no less than thirteen porpoises and fourteen seals. Personally, I do not understand how, even with two stomachs, a thirty-foot grampus could hold such a lot, unless they were very small specimens. The reader may not be aware that many whales have two or more stomachs, like ruminants, but whether they rechew their food is doubtful. The immobility of the tongue, and in some species the absence of teeth, is supposed to make this improbable, but to the writer this immobility of the tongue is not proved; it seems to be a great purple pillow covered with innumerable nerve points which might readily break up the small shrimps on the rough, mat-like surface of the whalebone palate. If they ruminate, and that under water for hours at a time, it would account for the way they sometimes appear all at once in numbers and feed voraciously, and then vanish for hours.