“Oh, where?” I cried. “Where are they?”
The Admiral paid no attention to me, of course, and the other Kanaka in his hoops took up the cry in the usual melodious fashion. Then I saw the white plumes for which I had been looking for a day and a half. They were directly to leeward, and about three miles off. I found them with the glass, and I remember that I was perfectly entranced with watching them. I could not see the bodies of the whales at that distance, and not much more than the hump shows above water, anyway, when the whales are undisturbed; but the spouts arose, at intervals, in a leisurely sort of way, much like the occasional spurt of steam from the stack of a locomotive at rest at a station. The spout of the sperm whale does not go straight up, but forward at an angle. And as the spouts rose, they went more slowly yet, and they spread out and drifted slowly for a moment, perfect plumes, and vanished.
It seemed to be a small pod of whales, I could not tell just how many, for no sooner did one come to the surface and blow, than another, having had his spoutings out, would up flukes and go down. No one could miss seeing that, the great flukes high in air just before the whale sounded, and the cry from the masthead of “There go flukes!” seemed wholly unnecessary.
At that time I did not know very much about the habits of whales, or about anything else, for that matter, connected with the life I thought I had elected. Whales—sperm whales, for I always mean sperm whales when I say simply whales—when undisturbed pursue their regular round of activities in an extraordinarily orderly manner. They go below the surface to feed. Nobody knows how deep they go, but they go deep enough to find the squid on which they feed. Sounding whales frequently take half a mile of whale line almost straight down, sometimes more; and they often come up straight at the boat. There is no means of knowing whether they go habitually deeper than that, but the pressure upon their huge bodies at that depth is something enormous, and the changes of pressure in coming up at the rate they sometimes—often—do come up are very rapid. Deep-sea fish, pulled from that depth, are apt to be turned nearly inside out, because of their inability to regulate the pressure in their air-bladders quickly enough. I never knew what mechanism the whale uses, if he has any, to guard against the consequences of such rapid pressure changes, but he certainly does not use the air-bladder method. It makes very little difference what method he uses, or whether he has any other than his great strength, it works very well, and in a way perfectly satisfactory to the whale.
Having sounded by the simple method of throwing his flukes in the air, and pointing his body straight down, he stays down for a time which is constant for the individual whale, so far as anybody has been able to observe, and surprisingly uniform for whales in general, taking into account age, size, and sex. The time is undoubtedly determined by the reserves of oxygenated blood he has been able to accumulate in some way or other—entirely obscure to me—to enable him to close his spiracles and hold his breath for an hour or more. For a full-grown bull whale will stay down for an hour or an hour and ten minutes, and when he comes up he breathes perhaps seventy times at intervals of about eleven seconds. When he has taken the usual number of breaths, which is known as “having his spoutings out,” he ups flukes and goes down again. A female will stay down from thirty to forty minutes, and young whales perhaps twenty to thirty, depending upon their age and strength.
Whales are not always feeding, of course, and when not so engaged, and when they are feeling lively, they may amuse themselves with play, much as other animals do. The play of a sportive whale is not of a kind that I ever cared to join in. They sometimes come up from the depths at great speed, and throw their bodies clean out of the water. This is called “breaching.” Breaching may not be the play of a whale that is particularly sportive, but due to an effort to clear the body of barnacles and crabs and such-like. And they sometimes raise their flukes high in air, and bring them down on the surface again, or “lobtail,” the blow upon the surface of the water making a noise like a great gun that can be heard for a great distance.
They have other things which they do with their flukes, which seem to be endowed with a special sense of touch, like the fingers of a blind person. Indeed, as I think I have said, the sight of whales is very poor. The eyes of a whale are so placed in his head that there are considerable angles in front and behind throughout which he could see nothing if he had the best of eyes; but it is more than that. His eyes do not seem to be of the best.
I have never chanced to see any explanation of this which seemed reasonable, but one occurred to me after I had learned to swim, which I did a few years later. It is not possible for me to see outlines clearly under water, and I suppose that the same thing is true of any normal person. The reason is that the curvature of the surface of the eye is adapted to use in air. Water is, of course, more dense than air, optically as well as in other ways, and to see well in water the eye surfaces would have to be much more curved. In other words, the eye would have to be very near-sighted in air to have normal sight under water. It is of some importance to the whale to have normal sight under water, although there again is the difficulty of nearly total absence of light at great depths. But I should expect to find the whale very near-sighted, and perhaps with an eye somewhat similar to that of nocturnal animals. I do not know whether anybody has ever observed that. I never have. It is somewhat difficult to make such observations.
I have interrupted my narrative to say something about the habits of whales, for I hope that has made it evident how hard it was for a greenhorn like me to tell the number of whales in the pod from the number of spouts that I could identify at any one time. In fact, there were times when all had disappeared; but I stayed there, crouched on my hunkers just forward of the lubber-hole, with my back against the mast, and I watched those drifting plumes of vapor, and I was much excited and quite happy.
The boats had been lowered, the harpooners overhauling their irons as the boats were dropped into the water. I watched the four boats tossing in the sea astern of us while their crews were stepping the masts and setting the sails. Mr. Baker’s boat got her sail set first, and stood away for the whales; then Mr. Brown, the third mate, who seemed to have his crew well in hand. Mr. Brown was a silent, uncommunicative man, but he knew his duties, and something more. Then came Mr. Tilton’s boat, only a couple of seconds behind the third mate. Mr. Tilton was fourth mate. Last of all came Mr. Wallet, fully a minute behind the others. I am afraid I snickered at that, but it was just what I had expected and hoped for. I hardly know why I had taken such a dislike to Mr. Wallet so early in the voyage, for he had not been unpleasant to me in any way. It must have been because I thought him a poor stick.