A Year with a Whaler

by Walter Noble Burns

During the storm we kept a man at the wheel and another on the try-works as a lookout. One day during my trick at the wheel, I was probably responsible for a serious accident, though it might have happened with the most experienced sailor at the helm. To keep the brig in the trough of the seas, I was holding her on a certain point of the compass, but the big waves buffeted the vessel about with such violence that my task was difficult. Captain Shorey was standing within arm's length of me, watching the compass. A sea shoved the brig's head to starboard and, as if it had been lying in ambush for just such an opportunity, a giant comber came curling in high over the stern. It smashed me into the wheel and for an instant I was buried under twenty feet of crystal water that made a green twilight all about us.

Then the wave crashed down ponderously upon the deck and I was standing in clear air again. To my astonishment, the captain was no longer beside me. I thought he had been washed overboard. The wave had lifted him upon its top, swept him high over the skylight the entire length of the quarter-deck and dropped him on the main deck in the waist. His right leg was broken below the knee. Sailors and boat-steerers rushed to him and carried him into the cabin, where Mr. Winchester set the broken bones. We put into Unalaska a week later and the surgeon of the revenue cutter Bear reset the leg. This was in the last days of March. The captain was on crutches in July, when we caught our first whale.

The storm did not blow itself out. It blew us out of it. We must have drifted sidewise with the seas about six hundred miles. At dawn of the second day, after leaving the fury of the forties behind, we were bowling along in smooth water with all sails set. The sky was clear and the sea like hammered silver. Far ahead a mountain rose into the sky—a wedge-shaped peak, silver-white with snow, its foot swathed in purple haze. It rose above Unimak Pass, which connects the Pacific Ocean and Behring Sea between Unimak and Ugamok islands of the Fox Island chain.

Unimak Pass is ten miles broad, and its towering shores are sheer, black, naked rock. Mr. Winchester, who had assumed command after the captain had broken his leg, set a course to take us directly through the passage. Running before a light breeze that bellied all our sails, we began to draw near the sea gorge at the base of the mountain. Then, without warning, from over the horizon came a savage white squall, blotting out mountain, pass, sea, and sky.

I never saw bad weather blow up so quickly. One moment the ship was gliding over a smooth sea in bright sunlight. The next, a cloud as white and almost as thick as wool had closed down upon it; snow was falling heavily in big, moist flakes, a stiff wind was heeling the vessel on its side, and we could not see ten feet beyond the tip of the jib boom.

The wind quickened into a gale. By fast work we managed to furl sails and double-reef the topsail before they carried away. Soon the deck was white with four or five inches of snow. On the forecastle-head Big Foot Louis was posted as lookout. Everybody was anxious. Mr. Winchester took his stand close by the main shrouds at the break of the poop and kept gazing ahead through his glasses into the mist. The sailors and boat-steerers crowded the forward rails, peering vainly into the swirling fog. Big Foot Louis bent forward with his hand shielding his eyes from the falling snow.

"Land, land!" he cried.

If it were land that Louis saw through the clouds and blinding snow, it was mighty close. Our doom seemed sealed. We expected the ship to crash bows-on upon the rocks. We nerved ourselves for the shock. A momentary vision of shipwreck on those bleak coasts in snow and storm obsessed me. But Louis's eyes had deceived him. The ship went riding on its stately way through the blinding snow before the gale.

The situation was ticklish, if not critical. We had been headed squarely for the passage before the storm closed down. Now we could not see where we were going. If we held directly upon our course we were safe. If the gale blew us even slightly out of our way, shipwreck and death on the rock-bound shore awaited us. Which would it be?