For several hours the brig sailed steadily on this course. Along about 9 o'clock, we saw the peculiar, cold, light look above the sky line ahead which meant ice and which sailors call an "ice horizon," to be distinguished at a glance from a water horizon, which is dark. A little later, we sighted the white loom of the great ice continent. Later still, we picked up the bergs, floes, islands, and chunks of ice which drift forever along its edge.
The brig kept on its course. A floe of ice, looking at a distance like a long, narrow ribbon, lay ahead of us, apparently directly across our path. As we drew nearer, we began to make out dimly a certain dark speck upon the edge of the ice. This speck gradually assumed definiteness. It was our cask and we were headed straight for it. To a landlubber unacquainted with the mysteries of navigation, this incident may seem almost unbelievable, but upon my honest word, it is true to the last detail.
After the brig had been laid aback near the ice, a boat was lowered and a hole was cut in the bow of the whale's head. A cable was passed through this and the other end was made fast aboard the ship. Then under light sail, the brig set about the work of pulling the whale out of the ice. The light breeze fell away and the three boats were strung out ahead with hawsers and lent assistance with the oars. It was slow work. But when the breeze freshened, the ice began gradually to give, then to open up, and finally the whale was hauled clear and drawn alongside for the cutting in.
[CHAPTER XXIII]
AND SO—HOME
It was on October tenth that we broke out the Stars and Stripes at our main gaff and squared our yards for home. Everybody cheered as the flag went fluttering up, for everybody was glad that the end of the long, hard voyage was in sight. Behring Straits which when we were about to enter the Arctic Ocean—sea of tragedy and graveyard of so many brave men and tall ships—had looked like the portals of inferno, now when we were homeward bound seemed like the gateway to the Happy Isles.
The four whales we had captured on the voyage had averaged about 1,800 pounds of baleen, which that year was quoted at $6.50 a pound. We had tried out all our whales except the last one and our casks were filled with oil. Our entire catch was worth over $50,000. The officers and boatsteerers made a pretty penny out of the voyage. The captain, I was told, had shipped on a lay of one-sixth—and got it. The sailors had shipped on the 190th lay—and didn't get it. That was the difference. At San Francisco, the forecastle hands were paid off with the "big iron dollar" of whaling tradition.
The homeward voyage was not a time of idleness. We were kept busy a large part of the time cleaning the bone of our last three whales—the bone from our first whale had been shipped to San Francisco from Unalaska. As we had at first stowed it away, the baleen was in bunches of ten or a dozen slabs held together at the roots by "white horse," which is the whaler name for the gums of the whale. These bunches were now brought up on deck and each slab of baleen was cut out of the gums separately and washed and scoured with cocoanut rind procured for the purpose in the Hawaiian Islands. Then the slabs were dried and polished until they shone like gun metal, tied into bales, and stowed under hatches once more.