The other boats were coming up; they were nearly there. Mr. Brown thought he saw a chance, and ordered us to pull up close. We did, and the whale still lay there wallowing. We grounded on his back, and Mr. Brown pumped his lance up and down twice. There was no time for more, for the whale went down suddenly, with a flourish of his flukes, barely missing us. He did not go deep, however, for while we were watching the line and the sea, he floated up under us, belly up, with his jaw almost at right angles with his body. There was no time to escape. That jaw came down with a quick snap, cutting the boat cleanly in two between the tub-and the after-oar, spilling the men into the sea, and getting a tubful of line entangled in his teeth. I saw him spout thick blood just as I went over, clinging to my oar.
When I had come to the surface, and had cleared the water out of my eyes, the whale was trying to get rid of that tub of whale line. I could hardly help laughing, although my situation was not one for laughter, the whale reminded me so strongly of a person who had got a mouthful of hair, or of the bristles from an old toothbrush. He seemed to feel almost the same disgust. The two other boats, coming up, were almost at his flukes, and the ship had come very near. The whale caught sight of her, and instantly made for her with a vigor unexpected in a whale that spouts thick blood. The ship was broadside on, and her sails were already aback, so that she could do nothing. The whale struck her with his head amidships. If he had been merely angry, and not hurt, that butting might very well have been a catastrophe for us. But the vigor with which he had started had ebbed rapidly away, and his butt was feeble, although I saw the upper masts quiver, and the masthead man was rattled about like a die in a box. Then he drew off and rammed again. That second attempt was more feeble yet. He could do no more than rub against the hull; and he passed under her, and floated to the surface on the other side, fin out, with no flurry, unless his feeble buttings had been his flurry.
Mr. Macy and Captain Coffin were picking us up. The tub-oarsman was found floating amid the wreckage, his arm over his oar, unconscious. He did not recover consciousness for an hour, but then seemed to be all right. He must have been hit on the head by something, nobody could guess what. They would have thought it the teeth of the whale, except that the lower jaw, which contains all the teeth, is too narrow to reach both the tub-and the after-oarsman; and Black Man’el was again severely mauled by the teeth of the whale, on the same side that was so recently healed. This time it was not his arm, but his back. On that ebony surface there were three or four bloody wipes, where the teeth had ripped it in the process of closing. Black Man’el, however, did not miss a day’s duty on account of it, taking his regular place in the boat when it was called away, although his back must have been lame and sore for days.
That whale made eighty-five barrels. As I was watching the mates cutting off the head, Peter stopped for a moment beside me.
“He’s a scarred old lad,” he said, “is n’t he, Timmie? Do you see the marks of teeth he ’s carried around for many a year?”
I did see them; old scars of the teeth of some other bull, running up diagonally from his mouth. That other bull must have bitten deep, for each tooth-mark was separate, and still formed a little hollow, like the little weathered hollows in a rock, where water gathers, or the regular marks of a drill. There were other scars, too, of wounds where the teeth seemed to have ripped and torn their way viciously.
“How do they get those scars, Peter? Fighting, I suppose; but how do they fight?”
“I ’ve never seen them fighting, lad. But those who have seen it tell me that they draw off from each other a little way, and go at each other full tilt. They turn on their side, like, to give their jaws play, and bite and wrench and tear. Sometimes they ’ll use their jaws like fencing foils, without drawing off; but however they do it, they must be savage at it. If they fence, they don’t wear masks.”
“Shall we see fighting whales, Peter?”
He smiled. “We may see ’most anything, lad. It ’s hard to tell. I ’ve never seen ’em, but perhaps my turn is due for that this voyage.”