All is very quiet and peaceful to-night, and no references are made to last night. Sailors have nerves as well as other folk, and I daresay all on board will take a day or two to recover from the excitement and drenching, and the bitter, nauseating feeling of being up against one’s end on a storm-beaten coast in black night. I have a curious feeling that even writing about such a recent and painful situation is almost indelicate. To put in time Henriksen draws on his recollection of killers or grampuses attacking a whale, and I help it with what I have seen of a similar incident. He saw this particular incident off Korea; I have seen several whales being attacked both in northern and southern latitudes amongst the Antarctic ice; in fact, I once could have jumped on to the back of one as it rose right under our stern and gave a huge blast or sigh, with a pack of these black-and-white marauders surrounding it!
That was a night in the Antarctic worth recalling. It was a still day, far inside the pack ice. I remember being lost in admiration of the quiet blue lanes of water, blue and violet, and the many pearl-like tints of the ice, and as I looked northerly I was astonished to see penguins jumping on to the floe ice in a great hurry, down the sides of one of these long lanes. Penguins do not show themselves in the water, they suddenly leap out like trout and disappear. In this case they remained on the ice-floes, skedaddling to their centres in an agitated manner. Then the cause of the emeute appeared—there were hurried blasts from two whales coming down the lane towards us, and behind them the splashing of a pack of black-and-white killers. On they came, the penguins popping on to the ice edges, jumping two or three feet clear of water, and I had time to get into our mizen rigging and get a fine view of the first whale, a hundred feet long, as he sailed under our keel. The next one rose to blow immediately under our counter, and anyone standing at our wheel could have jumped on its back.
I did not see the end of the chase. I expect the whales were making a flight into tightly packed ice, under which they could possibly go to greater distance than the killers without breathing—at least that is our explanation of their manœuvre.
These, of course, were finner whales, we were hunting for Right whales, the difference between the two in shape, etc., I have referred to at the beginning of this book.
Delgada again. Here are some oddments in this chapter. I notice I put down in my log that I suffer from sore feet—sunburned insteps—and see Portuguese doctor, you go bare-footed on such boats as ours in sub-tropics, and this was the result.
I met the captain of our wreck, the B—enido, a Welshman, in a tight place, and almost as silent on shore as on his ship, but I felt sorry for him.
The engines were thoroughly overhauled, and favourable was the verdict of the engineers on them—which was satisfactory for all hands; the first engineer, a Swede, would like to take three hundred shares in our Company if he could get them. He is so confident about our engine, possibly he may more correctly be described as sanguine.