A Year with a Whaler

by Walter Noble Burns

The other boat hurried to the rescue and the crew gathered up the half-drowned sailors perched on the bottom of the upturned boat or clinging to floating sweeps. Fouled in the rigging of the sail, held suspended beneath the wreck in the green crystal of the sea water, they found the Night King, dead.

When the whale crushed the boat—at the very moment, it must have been—the Night King had snatched the knife kept fastened in a sheath on the bow thwart and with one stroke of the razor blade, severed the harpoon lines. He thus released the whale and prevented it from dragging the boat away in its mad race. The Night King's last act had saved the lives of his companions.

I helped lift the body over the rail. We laid it on the quarter deck near the skylight. It lurched and shifted in a ghastly sort of way as the ship rolled, the glazed eyes open to the blue sky. The captain's Newfoundland dog came and sniffed at the corpse. Sheltered from the captain's eye behind the galley, the Kanaka cabin boy shook a furtive fist at the dead man and ground out between clenched teeth, "You black devil, you'll never kick me again." Standing not ten feet away, the mate cracked a joke to the second mate and the two laughed uproariously. The work of the ship went on all around.

Looking upon the dead thing lying there, I thought of the pride with which the living man had borne himself in the days of his power. I beheld in fancy the silent, lonely, imperious little figure, pacing to and fro on the weather side of the quarter-deck—to and fro under the stars. I saw him stop in the darkness by the wheel, as his custom was, to peer down into the lighted binnacle and say in vibrant tones, "Keep her steady," or "Let her luff." I saw him buttoned up in his overcoat to keep the dew of the tropical night from his rheumatic joints, slip down the poop ladder and stump forward past the try-works to see how things fared in the bow. Again I heard his nightly cry to the lookout on the forecastle-head, "Keep a bright lookout dere, you," and saw him limp back to continue his vigil, pacing up and down. The qualities that had made him hated when he was indeed the Night King flooded back upon me, but I did not forget the courage of my enemy that had redeemed them all and made him a hero in the hour of death.

In the afternoon, old Nelson sat on the deck beside the corpse and with palm and needle fashioned a long canvas bag. Into this the dead man was sewed with a weight of brick and sand at his feet.

At sunset, when all hands were on deck for the dog watch, they carried the body down on the main deck and with feet to the sea, laid it on the gang-plank which had been removed from the rail. There in the waist the ship's company gathered with uncovered heads. Over all was the light of the sunset, flushing the solemn, rough faces and reddening the running white-caps of the sea. The captain called me to him and placed a Bible in my hands.

"Read a passage of scripture," he said.

Dumbfounded that I should be called upon to officiate at the burial service over the man I had hated, I took my stand on the main hatch at the head of the body and prepared to obey orders. No passage to fit my singular situation occurred to me and I opened the book at random. The leaves fell apart at the seventh chapter of Matthew and I read aloud the section beginning:

"Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."

At the close of the reading the captain called for "The Sweet Bye and Bye" and the crew sang the verses of the old hymn solemnly. When the full-toned music ceased, two sailors tilted the gang-plank upwards and the remains of the Night King slid off and plunged into the ocean.