So we muse or dream on ocean’s bosom, and read a little of monastic times, since we are on the St Ebba, and disagree languidly with Froude’s conclusions on Erasmus and Luther, and occasionally we cast an eye round the empty horizon. When suddenly, from starboard, come leaping dolphins, breaking the smooth monotony of the blue water. They sweep to our bows, we dive from bridge to bow, seize the hand harpoon, and all our little community wakens up and collects on our bows. Here they come to starboard! and we get all clear for a lunge at one—no easy matter as our sails are down, and we are doing eight knots by motor and roll heavily. Swish, swish—two leap near our bows and the writer nearly goes overboard in an effort to drive the young pine-tree and harpoon home, but it misses by an inch and the frightened dolphins dash astern and come up to port bow as if we were stationary, and so we pass the harpoon over to Henriksen. He waits his chance and drives home a very clever thrust and away goes the line and Henriksen very nearly after it, and all hands get on to the rope, spring at it like ferrets at a rabbit, active as cats, a heap of them tumbling aft along bulwarks till amidships somehow or other the kicking dolphin is lugged over the side amongst the struggling young sailors, and one with an axe chops its tail quiet, and in a second or two our first cetacean, the destroyer of lovely flying-fish, breathes no more.
I should think it must weigh about two hundred pounds. Henriksen takes the opportunity to demonstrate on a small scale the process of flensing the blubber according to precedent, and his own plan, so that some of our hands, new to whaling, may know what is wanted when we get hold of sperm or the large finner whales. It is rather like a demonstration by a surgeon to students, so rapid, but more of this method anon.
Yes, we find remains of exquisite flying-fish inside the mammal, and yet none of us have seen flying-fish about here; are there then flying-fish here, but deep in the sea, or has the dolphin brought these from farther south?
Alas! that the deck of the St Ebba should be stained with gore. The best of the meat we have cut off, two long strips down the back, perhaps thirty pounds each, and into vinegar and water they go, enough fresh meat for all hands for several days, and the oil of the spec or blubber will probably amount to a gallon—one gallon clear profit for our shareholder—one little drop of the vast ocean of whale oil we hope to collect some day for the furtherance of British industries, and the manufacture of margarine and olive oil in Paris, and the hundred and one other purposes for which whale oil is used.
We have not exactly broken the Sabbath, for though we are a British ship the crew is Norse and the Norwegian Sunday begins on Saturday afternoon and ends at two on Sunday.
Henriksen is rather pleased that we have a young crew for our new kind of ship and methods, as older men would be more difficult to train to our special needs.
We see a large steamer, French, Italian or Spanish, in tow of a Liverpool tug, grey-black funnel—white ship. We have seen only four craft since we left Belfast.
P.S.—All hands have dolphin steak with fried onions for supper. It is not nearly so good as whale meat, but better than cormorant by miles—in fact, is quite palatable.
Who said that the romance of the sea has gone, that steam has driven it away? But that is not true; it is just as blue and full of fresh life and romance for all of us as it ever was. The new land or new port is just as new to me as it was to Romans or Carthaginians.