She Blows! And Sparm at That!

by William John Hopkins

I suppose I must have made up my mind that if I was to be drowned I should be drowned, and I might as well be comfortable about it, for as it was beginning to be gray in the east, with the melancholy waste of wild waters just visible, and that sinking of the soul which always comes at such a time, I went below and turned in again and went to sleep immediately.

The next day there was a stiff breeze from the southwest, which continued for several days. If the Clearchus had been at all fast, or even an average sailer, she would have made the Hatteras grounds in a couple of days; but that was a big “if,” as my father would have said with his quiet smile. Captain Nelson, knowing her well, made no attempt to crowd her, but went on under easy sail, so that we were a long time in getting to Hatteras. We got there toward the latter part of an afternoon. Cape Hatteras, of course, was not in sight, nor even the lightship on Diamond Shoals; but there was one vessel in sight. I tried to make myself believe that I knew it for the Desdemona or the Palmetto, but Captain Nelson said that neither of those ships was there. However, he announced his intention of going aboard of her, and said he would take me if I wanted to go.

I was delighted, and regarded it as a mark of special favor. It was. Captain Nelson was continually showing me those marks of favor, although if I had not behaved myself he would have stopped very soon. But I cannot remember that it ever occurred to me to do otherwise, and if I failed in any respect it was not by intention. Captain Nelson was very easy on those of good intentions, if they were not fools, and inclined to be indulgent toward harmless mischief, but very hard on malice or slacking, and showed them no mercy. Like many another man of action and results he had little patience with a fool. I think he blamed himself for this, and regarded it as a weakness, although he never said anything to me about it. I sympathize with him. All my life I have never been able to abide a fool, and there are many kinds; and I have been aware that it is a fault of character, and that I should have patience with them, for they cannot help their condition. But I have never been without faults, thank God, although I suppose that I was a good boy, on the whole. And I suppose that I should be ashamed of that, too, but I am not, and I never was. I do not believe that I ever thought about it.

Captain Nelson was going over for a “gam.” Now a gam is nothing more nor less than a gossip: each gives the other what news he has, the gossip of home from the outbound captain, and from the inbound the gossip of whales and their ways, and news of whalers and captains that he has met, the number of barrels of oil that the George and Susan has taken, the accident to the Addison, the men that the Gosnold lost by a fighting whale on the Carroll grounds, and any other items of interest that he can remember. The two captains, before they get through, may be telling anecdotes of other whalemen or of whales, or they may be talking of home or of Nantucket and Old Ma’am Hackett’s garden. They may have something hot and glasses between them, and the gam may last an hour or three hours or all day. It all depends upon the men. Two captains have been known to spend all day gamming, and to turn up again in the morning for more of it, but such an abuse of the practice is very rare. The gam has its useful purpose as well as its pleasant one—although any pleasant purpose is useful. The outbound captain gets the most out of it, the news of ships and of men, but most of all, the news of whales, and how they are running that season, and where they are to be met in plenty; much more recent news than he had when he sailed. But any really vital news likely to be of benefit to himself—a new whaling ground discovered, for instance, hitherto unknown, in which whales are plentiful—he carefully keeps to himself. The crew are not so careful, although many of them are close-mouthed.

The vessel had been cutting in, as Captain Nelson could tell without his glass, and as Peter Bottom and every other old hand could tell. I could not see what they were doing, and I have no reason to think that any of the green hands could. She was more than three miles away, and there was a light bluish haze which made it difficult to see clearly, but I got a pair of battered field glasses from the rack, and managed to make out dimly the outline of some sort of a flimsy structure on her side, the crew all crowded up by the windlass, and something bulky being hoisted in over the gangway. Captain Nelson had given me the use of those old field glasses, as nobody else wanted them. I would have carried them about with me, for I felt very proud and important at having glasses of my own; but it would have taken a dray or an ice wagon at least to carry them.

A boat was lowered, Peter Bottom being in the crew of the boat, and set off with the captain standing just in front of the steersman, his head in constant danger from the handle of the long steering oar, and his stomach from the shaft of the stern oar as it swung. He had to stand, for there was no seat for him. Whaleboats are not designed for carrying passengers. But he kept his feet and his dignity at the same time, and I felt a great admiration for the way in which he did both. I was perched up in the bow, in the harpooner’s place, and found the thigh-hole in the clumsy cleat a great convenience in keeping my own balance and dignity. Then I gazed ahead over the little sunken deck—the “box”—with its length of whale line ready coiled upon it, and imagined myself striking a whale; and I raised my arms in the attitude of a harpooner darting the harpoon, and I hurled the imaginary weapon with tremendous force—all imaginary, of course—and it sunk to the haft in the great body; and I heard a snicker, and looked around, and there was one of the mates—I think it must have been Mr. Wallet, although it was not his boat—grinning at me from his place at the steering oar, and Captain Nelson was smiling. I had already developed a cordial detestation of Mr. Wallet. I remember to this day how red and uncomfortable I got, even to the back of my neck. But I turned about at once, and stood as stiff as a ramrod with the help of the thigh-hole, and I looked ahead and I saw a great volume of black smoke rising from the try-works. Astern of her there was something in the water, with an immense flock of screaming gulls continually rising and settling again like a fountain. It looked much like the sight I have often seen up to a few years ago, off T wharf in Boston, the fishermen packed three deep about the wharf and all the men busy either unloading and weighing their fares of fish, or baiting trawls, and patches of scraps and gurry on the water, and crowds of great gray or black-and-white herring gulls screaming and dipping and elbowing for their share of the vile stuff.

We were getting near enough for me to see things clearly. The vessel’s starboard side was toward us, and there hung the cutting-stage by the gangway. Strangely enough, perhaps, I had never before seen a cutting-stage. When a ship is in port they are not in evidence, and we had had no occasion yet to rig ours. It is a simple affair of three planks, the two shorter ones butted against the side of the ship and resting on the wales. The two short planks keep the outer plank, which is longer, at the proper distance from the side. The planks are bolted together at the outer corners, and are held up by ropes running from the outer corners to the main rigging at one end, and at the other to a post rising above the rail of the ship. Most of the work is done from the long outer plank, which has bolted on its inner edge posts of iron supporting a light railing. It is somewhat of a mystery why the men do not fall off of those few inches of slippery, rocking plank, with nothing at their backs but the wide ocean. They are supposed to have monkey-ropes about their waists—usually forgotten—or a line at their backs along the cutting-stage, and they have long, heavy spades in their hands, which seem to anchor them. Sometimes they do fall off among the sharks, but they rarely come to any harm. But at the time it looked to me like a very insecure footing, and I was sure any house-painter would have rejected it with scorn.

The ship turned out to be the Palm, of New Bedford, and the captain was an old friend of Captain Nelson’s. The two stood apart, aft, for some time, watching the busy men about the try-pots. The men were stripped to the waist, most of them, and laughing and talking among themselves like children. Some were passing pieces of blubber from the hatch to the mincers; some were mincing the blubber on those pieces with heavy knives much like a butcher’s cleaver with a handle at each end; some were carrying the minced pieces to the try-pots; and some were stirring the mess in the pots or feeding the fire, with long, two-pronged iron forks in their hands. The black smoke billowed up over their heads, and copper gleamed red in the rays of the low western sun, and the half-naked bodies wet with sweat gleamed red, and there was a reddish tinge to the black smoke. It looked like an orgy of devils about the pots, and when the men came out from behind the try-works I almost expected to see their forked tails hanging down, and cloven feet.

The two captains went into the cabin, and there was nothing for the rest of us to do, for the crew of the Palm were too thoroughly occupied to give us much of a welcome. Everything was covered with oil and with huge pieces of what looked like butcher’s meat, besides the blubber. Whale-meat is red, much the color of beef, only darker, although it does not look like beef. We have recently been asked to eat it, as if that were a new idea. And the newspapers have had their short articles, or perhaps a column, carefully timed, telling us how good it is, and that it is getting to be quite the fashion at New York hotels, and that some firm in Oregon has been asked to put up a million or two cans of it. I even saw some displayed in the window of a fish market for two or three weeks; the same pieces, I judged, from their continually ripening color. It did not seem to be in any great demand. Whalemen have eaten whale-meat for a century or more. It is the meat of the right whale that is eaten. Sperm whale meat is full of oil and not edible. Once is usually enough for a man, a steak cut from the small. Even right whale meat does not seem to be a favorite article of diet, although porpoise steaks are good, and porpoises are whales.

At the time I knew nothing of the palatability of whale-meat, and I was interested only in the trying-out process. I stepped carelessly nearer, and my foot slipped on the oily deck, and I should have gone down if it had not been for a strong arm that caught me about the body; and I found myself gazing into the smiling face of Peter Bottom, and at an enormous raw and bloody jaw that was just behind him in the scuppers. It was more than fifteen feet long—the jaw, not Peter’s face—and it was armed with backward curved teeth, not close together, but spaced rather widely; several inches between the teeth. They did not look so very formidable; not nearly so wicked as a shark’s, and the whale’s upper jaw has no teeth. But whale’s teeth were no new thing to me, although I had never seen a jaw freshly cut off, with the ragged and bloody flesh on it.