The Tail of a Sperm or Cachalot Whale Sounding
There was too much at stake on this occasion for the writer to do the harpooning, so Henriksen took the gun and harpoon. The actual firing and hitting a whale any good pistol-shot can do. But manœuvring the vessel, stalking the whale, as it were, needs a good deal of experience, and it goes without saying one must have perfect sea-legs, indeed, that is perhaps the greatest difficulty. It takes a great deal of experience to be unconscious, when there is a roll on, of any effort to balance oneself, which is, of course, absolutely essential for a successful shot.
At last the grey, blunt-headed whale rose almost in front of us a little to starboard, blew his blast and went under for a few yards and rose again dead in front of our bow; higher and higher his back rose, then Bang!—and we were fast and the line rattling out.
That was a grand boom! and a straight shot. A great surge followed as the whale went down, and out went the five-inch rope—for but a short distance, though it was a heavy rope, spun for far more powerful prey than the sperm or cachalot, and we soon began to reel in, and the writer with a long lance ended the valuable animal’s troubles.
I noticed, as the point of the lance went into the whale, that its silky grey skin was marked here and there with series of circles, something like Burmese writing magnified. I take these to be the marks from the suckers on the tentacles of the great cuttle-fish on which the sperm feeds, and here and there, over its great sides, were deeper scrawls—light-brown-coloured lines on the greyish skin which may have been made by the cuttle-fishes’ parrot-like beaks. Two of its companions came alongside it while it was still alive, and tried to help it by shouldering it away from us.
Had we only had a bay to tow these whales into we would have easily taken more, but we did not quite know how the Portuguese would have welcomed us had we towed their bodies back to Ponta Delgada after killing them, if not exactly at their own doors, still within sight of their town.
The big grey backs with their blunt noses looked intensely interesting when we first came amongst them—cruising about and puffing little forward jets of spray almost without the least regard to our presence....
We have waited several months for the sight, and I am inclined to think we feel repaid—that is, looking at the matter merely as hunting.
... Somehow I feel at a loss here how to describe the accumulation of feelings at the end of the long waiting and planning. We feel we are right on the high road to success, our engine worked perfectly, our vessel was apparently calculated to a nicety to approach and kill whales, and to keep the sea almost indefinitely.