During the day the ship stands along under easy sail so that nothing will be missed, usually going to windward slowly, tacking or beating; picking up whales if they are seen and can be got. At sunset light sails are taken in, topsails close-reefed, and everything done to insure the ship’s making as little progress as possible during the night. They even wear ship occasionally, to keep in the same place throughout the night. At six in the morning—four bells—or perhaps earlier if they are in the more temperate latitudes, the crew is called up, sail restored, decks washed and scrubbed, and she is off again on her beating to windward. It made me think of the terns fishing off Ricketson’s Point in Padanaram: tacking slowly, beating to windward, the eyes above the coral-red bill, like a man at the masthead, keeping a bright lookout for fish; then coming down swiftly with the wind to the leeward side of their cruising ground to begin once more their slow beating against the wind. In just this way, when the ship has reached the windward edge of her cruising ground, she wears around, and comes down before it, to repeat the process until the old man has tired of it.
We had been doing this for three weeks, since the Annie Battles parted from us, without taking any whales. We had seen but two spouts, and lowered once without result. The other spout was sighted about sunset, and we did not lower. I was standing, one morning, by the rail, as I was always doing when I had a chance, and Macy was walking the deck behind me. As he was passing I turned to him.
“No sign of the Battles,” I said. I had been thinking of her, and my remark was only the continuation of my thought.
“No sign of the Battles,” he said cheerfully, stopping by me for a moment. “I ’m glad of it. I thought we should surely see her again before this, but we have n’t, and good riddance, I say.”
He began his pacing the deck again, and I strolled forward. I found Peter sitting beside the windlass, working on his model. I never knew Peter to be asleep. He did not seem to need sleep. I told him what Macy had said.
“Aye, Tim,” he said, “and I hope so too. The sea ’s a big place, but it ’s a little place, too, and you ’re always running across some vessel you don’t want to see, ’specially when she ’s on the same business as yourself. One voyage I made to eastern ports, Canton, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Manila, and the like, I was always meeting Tim Fernand, who ’d been my shipmate in the navy. He ’d shipped on the Mary Easton, and she followed us around from port to port, or beat us to it. I was hard put to it to get rid of him, for he ’d fasten on me like a leech, and he was a robber.”
“Like the Annie Battles.”
Peter looked up at me with a smile in his eyes, but said nothing, and then there came down to us from the masthead the familiar, quavering cry. Peter sighed, put down his model, and got up. It was a single spout—from a lone whale, so far as he could judge—miles off to the southeast. Peter turned back to me.
“Speak of the devil,” he said. “Do you see, Tim? Just there, well beyond the whale? What do you make of it?”
I was a long time in seeing anything, but at last I made out dimly the two slender topmasts with their yards, but no sails.