HARPOONING PORPOISE
We had unbroken good weather, with variable winds, mostly southerly or easterly during the first part of the passage, and westerly and northerly during the last part, but always of good strength. One morning, I remember, there was a great school of porpoises playing about the ship. They seemed even more antic than usual, leaping and diving and playing tag, and otherwise showing their contempt for a vessel which could not go any faster than the Clearchus.
Their cavortings were too much for Aziel Wright, George Hall, and Miller, three of the boatsteerers. They easily got permission, and Hall was first with a porpoise-iron, and was getting out on the jibboom. Miller got down into the forechains, Wright staying on deck. Hall and Miller got their porpoises, and then more, until there were half a dozen thumping the deck. The whole crew had gathered, and the men laid hold of the line when a porpoise was struck, and hauled him on deck by main strength.
Then they killed them. It seemed to me a horrid job, but I watched it, as boys will watch horrid jobs; in the same spirit which used to prompt me to go occasionally to John Green’s slaughter-house, and see steers felled with a sledge, and have their throats ripped up with a sharp knife as you would rip up an old boot leg. They used to kill sheep there in what seemed to me a particularly brutal manner, and I have seen the men step up nonchalantly to a calf hung by its bound hind legs, seize it by the nose, and cut its head off, without a sound of remonstrance from the calf. These methods were quite usual at the time. Boys are queer little savages.
We had porpoise-steak for two or three days after that, and then hash. Porpoise-steak tastes pretty good to a man who has been nearly two months without fresh meat. A porpoise is really a small whale, and is roughly about the size of a swordfish. There must be comparatively few people who have not seen porpoises. The meat is much like whale-meat, but more tender and better flavored.
A fine oil is extracted from the porpoise, the best coming from the jaw. The porpoise jaw-oil is used for chronometers and watches. Mr. Baker thought we might as well get everything the porpoises had to give, and he had the blubber tried out, and the jaw-oil. There was a small quantity of jaw-oil, to which we added later.
CHAPTER XIII
In 1872 the sperm whale had almost disappeared from the Atlantic Ocean, and old whalemen thought that he was doomed to practical extinction. For twenty years or more sperm-whaling voyages had been lengthened to an average of nearly four years, and it had been necessary to hunt him over all the tropic and temperate seas of the world. I had reason to believe that Captain Nelson had not really expected to find any whales on the Hatteras grounds, and I know that he expected to find none on the Western grounds. Besides, it was late in the season by the time we reached the Western grounds, and it was likely that the whales would have disappeared, if they had been there at all. The mastheads were kept manned, however, as they were pretty generally.
We were rolling along easily in a light westerly breeze when Alexander, a Kanaka from Mr. Tilton’s boat, sounded his falsetto cry from the foremasthead. It was early in the forenoon, and I was busy below; but I heard the quick patter of feet on deck, and I knew what it meant. So I dropped everything just where I stood, and ran up. I happened to see the spout at once, a beautiful, light, feathery thing in the bright sunlight, more like the drooping ostrich plume than ever. There was but the one spout, repeated lazily at intervals, although the others of the pod, if there were others, might have sounded, and be feeding. The volume of the spout and the force with which it was expelled, as well as the interval between spouts, indicated a full-grown bull.
The whale had been sighted off the port bow, and was now nearly abeam of us, going slowly to the westward, and making a course which took him nearer to the ship as he went on. Mr. Brown was already away, with the light westerly breeze abeam, to head him off. Mr. Wallet, as usual, was some minutes longer in getting his sail up, and in getting under way. He headed still more to the westward. We began to wear ship, and to change our course to follow them.