A Year with a Whaler

by Walter Noble Burns

It was exciting to step on a small ice cake to face a wounded and savage okchug. The animal would come bouncing on its flippers straight at one with a vicious barking roar. The nose was the okchug's most vulnerable point. A tap on the nose with a club would stretch the great creature out dead. It required a cool head, a steady nerve, and a good aim to deliver this finishing stroke upon the small black snout. If one missed or slipped on the ice, the possible consequences would not have been pleasant. We tanned the skins of the okchugs and made them into trousers or "pokes." The meat was hung over the bows to keep in an ice-box of all outdoors. Ground up and made into sausages, it was a pièce de resistance on the forecastle bill of fare.

One night in the latter part of May we saw far off a great light flaring smokily across the sea. It was what is known in whaler parlance as a bug-light and was made by blazing blubber swinging in an iron basket between the two smokestacks of a whale-ship's try-works. By it the crew of that distant ship was working at trying out a whale. The bug-light signaled to all the whaling fleet the first whale of the season.

The great continent of ice drifting southward gradually closed round the fleet. The ships had worked so far in there was no escape. In the early part of June the brig was frozen in. For three weeks the vessel remained motionless in solid ice with every stitch of canvas furled. No water or land was in sight—nothing but one great sweep of broken and tumbled ice as far as the eye could see. Those three ice-bound June weeks were given over to idleness. A stove was placed in the forecastle and was kept going night and day. This made it possible to keep comfortable and to read.

We went on frequent seal hunts. We strolled across the frozen sea to visit the other ships, the nearest of which was two miles away. Visiting is called "gamming" by whalers. We learned the gossip of the fleet, who had taken the first whale, how many whales had been caught, the adventures of the ships, the comedies and tragedies of the whaling season.

We established, too, what we called the "Behring Sea Circulating Library." There were a number of books in every forecastle. These greasy, dog-eared volumes were passed about from ship to ship. Perhaps there were twenty books aboard the brig which had been read by almost every member of the crew, forward and aft. Before we got out of the ice, we had exchanged these volumes for an entirely new lot from other ships.

One morning I awoke with the ship rocking like a cradle. I pulled on my clothes and hurried on deck. The ice fields were in wild commotion. Great swells from some storm upon the open sea to the south were rolling under them. Crowded and tumultuous waves of ice twenty feet high chased each other across the frozen fields from horizon to horizon. The ship would sink for a moment between ridges of ice and snow, and then swing up on the crest of an ice mountain. Great areas of ice would fall away as if the sea had opened beneath them. Then they would shoot up and shut out half the sky. The broken and jagged edges of these white and solid billows appeared for an instant like a range of snowy sierras which, in another instant, would crumble from view as if some seismic cataclysm had shaken them down in ruin. The air was filled with grinding, crushing, ominous noises and explosions.

The ship was in imminent peril. In that mad turmoil of ice it seemed certain she would be ground to pieces. Captain Shorey, who was hobbling about on crutches, ordered a cask of bread, a cask of water, and a barrel of beef hoisted on deck ready to be thrown out on an ice cake in case the brig were wrecked and we were cast away.

In the grinding of the floes, the ship became wedged in between two immense pieces of ice. The great bergs washed closer and closer. When they rose on some tremendous billow, great caverns, washed out by the sea, appeared in their sides like mouths, edged with splinters and points of blue and glittering ice, like fangs. As they rose and fell, it seemed the two white monsters were opening and closing devouring maws for us while the suck of the water in their ice caves made noises like the roar of hungry beasts of prey.

A cable was run out hurriedly over the bow and a bowline at the end of it was slipped over a hummock of ice. With the inboard end wound around the windlass, all hands worked like beavers to heave the brig out of her dangerous position. It was all the crew could do to swing the windlass bars up and down. The ship went forward slowly, almost imperceptibly, and all the time the great bergs swept closer and closer. For a long time it looked as if we were doomed. There was no doubt about the ship's fate if the bergs struck it. But inch by inch, heave by heave, we hauled her through. Ten minutes later, the ice monsters came together with a force that would have crushed an ironclad.