Your great clock on the white campanile marks six A.M. and the sunlight glitters already on the blue tiles above the arches of the inner harbour. That is the place for an artist who would paint in highest toned water-colours—flowers, fruit, wine skins, white walls, and blue sea. I will grant you all this, San Miguel, but there’s a grim side to your island—cliffs and a lee-shore on a black night, and I seem to recall a wreck and rockets, distress signals all a fraud, and then there are those moonlike craters, your beauty spots. You and the Inferno, Saint Michael, seem to be somewhat neighbourly. And your people we recall, how kind to the stranger, a few of them, dark-haired girls in white dresses on green balconies seemed pretty enough, but in the country how close they seem to the soil, worn and aged, one good-looking among a thousand sad women, one pretty child in thread-bare rags healthy, amongst so many who looked pinched and hungry.
No, we do not drop tears at leaving you; but think hopefully of Madeira and Funchal to the S.E., where we may meet white people of our own race, and where I have seen whales; and perhaps we may have a day or two in the boats, off shore twenty miles, in the heat and blue rollers, fishing for tunny. A two-hundred-pounder, with the hard line cutting grooves in the gunwale as it whizzes into the depths, is good hunting.
I pen this farewell to the island in my bunk, looking out at the port, determined not to go on deck and see any more departures—that hurried one in the night watches to save a wreck was quite satisfying, so “we” doze and let the town and the island go by, and think of Madeira and the Cape Verde, and hope that some day soon our little expedition will begin to pay, and try to forget that so far we have only incurred expenses—five shillings here and five pounds there—pilotage and telegrams, and a thousand trifles that mount up alarmingly without one penny of return.
Thus musing somewhat sadly, and all the time listening to the beat of our engines, I notice they suddenly go a little slow, and a tide of depression that even the joy of leaving port will not quite raise, floods my spirits. Yes, they are dead slow now—something wrong again!—and I harden my heart and turn out and find we are heading back for the distant island—more weeks of detention, I can see. But—what is this—everyone is intently looking forward with craned necks!
Great Scott! There are whales—Sperm—as you live! At last—whales! One little blast on the calm grey ocean a mile away, then another, eight or nine. Nine times several hundred pounds sterling rolling round, each about a mile apart. Are we really in our senses—are we really to strike oil? Heaven be praised—it is not the engine—it is all right.
We’re after one.
Henriksen made a bee-line down to his cabin, got out powder and had the harpoon-gun loaded and ready in two shakes.
It is difficult to write about the day now, we are tired, the work has been great and our first whale worth, say, some hundred pounds, enough to cover our outward-bound expenses; it seems hardly believable.
It is true we have only one of these sperm. We could, I believe, have killed several, but for a completely new crew[10] at whaling; we thought one would be enough for us. It is a bit awkward with one fish running a line, to tackle a second that perhaps goes in the opposite direction, and the flensing at sea for such a small crew is such a big work that we simply stuck to the one.