She Blows! And Sparm at That!

by William John Hopkins

Then they both nodded, and we got the order. We heaved, and gained a couple of inches; heaved again, and six inches of line came in. Mr. Brown was not a yelling mate. He spoke only loud enough for us to hear.

Mr. Baker was an accomplished swearer, a linguist of parts. I did not know there was such a variety of oaths in the language until I heard him swearing at his crew, urging them to heave, and calling them more vile names than you would think any men would be willing to hear quietly. Swearing was very general on the Clearchus, and none of Mr. Baker’s language was to be taken seriously, which, of course, the men knew. I do not know what it is about the sea that prompts men to swear, but there must be something. Most of them get so that they cannot make the simplest remark without an oath. I was getting into the habit myself, although I had never been accustomed to using such language or to hearing it. Before I left home I had tried once or twice saying “Damn!” with inward quakings, and half expecting to see the heavens fall; now I said “Damn!” and other things quite fluently, without quakings of any kind, and before I got home I was a confirmed swearer. It is a bad habit, and weakens what is said rather than strengthening it. When I realized this I broke myself of the habit. Mr. Brown was no swearer, nor was Mr. Macy, nor Peter Bottom, nor the Prince, all of whom I admired, each according to his fashion.

With all Mr. Baker’s flow of language, his crew did not gain an inch more than we did; but the heaving must have had its effect on the whale. There was still a good deal of line out, perhaps fifteen or twenty fathoms, when he seemed to stop suddenly. There was a general cry of “Flukes!” and his flukes went into the air, and he sounded.

When Starbuck had struck, as I have said, he was a trifle late. He succeeded in getting one iron fast—in the small—but had to heave the other overboard. This second harpoon had been skittering over the waves ever since, here and there, according to its whim. It had not touched our line, although Mr. Brown had been afraid that it would; and it might easily have touched our line, for a whale swims low in the water, and there is seldom any part of him continually visible aft of his hump, so that there is nothing in the way. But the harpoon had touched Mr. Baker’s line several times—a good many times; each touch lasting but an instant, like the bite of a shark. A harpoon is even sharper than a shark’s tooth, and each touch had severed some of the tough strands. It was a wonder that the line had survived the heaving. It must have only just survived. When the whale sounded, Mr. Baker did not give him line, but was holding until last second. This may have been the proverbial last straw, or it may have been simply that the time had come for the line to part. At any rate, it parted. Mr. Baker cursed fluently in a really heartfelt way, and the line was rapidly hauled in. The last fathom of it was a mere feather of manila.

This left us alone fast to the whale. He did not go deep, however, and Mr. Baker was waiting, near us, for him to come up, which he did in about five minutes a few feet ahead of Mr. Baker’s boat. He came up almost vertically, his head and body shooting out of the water, and exposing his side fin. Then he fell over with a tremendous splash; but Mr. Baker had shot his lance into him, and quickly withdrawn it. The shank was bent, but Mr. Baker straightened it by knocking on the gunwale, and let him have it again.

Meanwhile we had been taking in our slack line as fast as we could, and when it tautened, heaving in on it to bring us up close enough for Mr. Brown to use his lance. We had not been able to keep the slack ahead of the whale, with all our haste, and he had got a turn around his flukes, like a half hitch, so that we could not shake it loose. It was impossible for us to haul in ahead of his flukes, and lancing them would be no more than an annoyance to the whale, like a mosquito bite. If he should take it into his head to slap that mosquito, it might prove more than an annoyance for us. There was nothing to be done but to slack off the line and try to row up to his side fin, where Mr. Brown wanted to be. We could not have hoped to do this if the whale’s attention had not been taken up with Mr. Baker’s boat. He seemed to attribute all his troubles to that boat, and was putting up a half-hearted sort of a fight; but even a half-hearted fight by a fairly husky whale is not to be taken lightly. Mr. Baker was having his hands full.

We pulled up to within a boat’s length, lay there for a few minutes watching for an opening; then, putting all our strength into our oars, we drove the boat in close to the side fin. Mr. Brown plunged the lance in deep, and began churning it slowly up and down, feeling for the heart or the great reservoir of arterial blood near it. The whale had lobtailed once upon feeling the lance, without doing any damage; but in a few strokes Mr. Brown’s lance had found the life. A tremor passed through the great body, a spout rose slowly from his spiracle black with clotted blood, he bestirred himself, and we backed off hastily. He was going into his flurry.

That flurry was not an elevating spectacle, but we all watched it. I was fascinated, and so the others seemed to be, all in Mr. Baker’s boat as well as in ours. Our attention for a long time had been so entirely taken up by the whale that not a man of the twelve—counting myself as a man—had looked about him, or been aware of anything but the whale and the two boats, and what was happening there. Suddenly Mr. Baker broke out in a perfect stream of curses. Mr. Brown smiled.

“Look!” he said. “Like a bad penny.”

We all looked where he pointed. There was the Annie Battles, not a mile away, bearing down directly upon us. Not one of us said a word, but two or three were grinning. It was beginning to seem funny.