It is utterly useless to dart the harpoon at the front of a sperm whale. The weapon almost always bounds back as if it were a mass of rubber it had struck against. We had to get as far as his eye before a chance would be offered. I saw his great cliff-like head shoot by. Then, as we came within range of his vision, within ten feet of him, he suddenly sank away from the boat and out of sight like a lump of lead, without a motion of his fins, or his flukes either, so far as I could judge by hearing. The Prince had darted, and so had Starbuck—and had missed by inches, at ten feet. It was comical to see the consternation and amazement of Starbuck, and I have no doubt the Prince’s surprise was nearly as great, although he would not show it so plainly. I did hear a grunt from him, however, and an exclamation. The harpoons had clashed under water. When they were hauled in, the Prince found the shank of his bent, and a gouge, fresh and bright, deep in the shank at the point of bending; and the edge of Starbuck’s was dulled and turned.
Mr. Macy’s boat, with George Hall the boat-steerer, had an exactly similar experience. Mr. Macy had not headed that boat long enough to overcome entirely the effect of Wallet’s slackness and generally slipshod way of doing things, and his crew did not respond quite so quickly or so well. Consequently his whale had just enough warning to begin to move, but not enough time to get under way, or to find out definitely what was up. His only escape was to sink from the head of the boat as quickly as a marlinspike that has been dropped overboard, or an anchor. Hall, however, had no chance to dart, and he had had experience enough to know it. We did not see those whales again except at a distance which was perfectly safe, and then they were swimming head out, making ten or twelve knots.
Later in the day I came upon a sort of a consolation gathering. Starbuck and the Prince and George Hall were the central figures, and there were the other two boatsteerers, Azevedo and Miller, and all the green hands standing on the fringe of the circle, with two or three older men. Starbuck was much mortified at his failure, and offered what excuse he could. The Prince may have been as much mortified as Starbuck, but he offered no excuse and said little. Hall was giving comfort, saying that it was not uncommon for whales to settle in that way, and escape, when they had no time to round out flukes and sound, although he did not see how they did it. No harpooner was to be blamed for missing a whale under those circumstances.
Then there was a babel of voices, each man who had seen it happen and thought about it at all—a man could hardly help thinking about it if he had once seen it—giving his own theory of how it was done. They seemed to run to the idea of interior ballast tanks. Hall smiled.
“It does not seem quite quick enough,” he said. “The whale would have to take in water ballast pretty sudden to sink as quick as he does. Besides, water won’t sink in water. If he could take in lead or old junk into his tanks, it would be different. I know that gannets have something like that, cells under the skin that they can fill or empty of air through their lungs; and man-o’-war birds have something of the kind, I believe, and so have other birds. I ’ve seen ’em and you ’ve all seen ’em. They seem to contract when they want to get down pretty quick. But I don’t pretend to know how a whale does it.”
There was more talk which I could not follow. After a while Azevedo asked Hall about what he called the “slick” or “glip,” and how he thought that communication was kept up. I did not know what they were talking about, of course. Hall shook his head, and said he had never seen any evidence of communication, although he had heard of it, but he would not commit himself on the subject, and he asked Peter. Peter said that he did not know anything about it.
“What is that, Peter?” I asked in an undertone. “What ’s glip?” I knew what a slick was.
“I don’t rightly know, Tim,” he answered. “Whales always leave a slick—a smooth place, oily-like—on the water when they round out and sound quietly. It must be something like the oil bags we had over our bows in that gale off Hatteras. But they say that there ’s a sort of a telegraph between the whale and his slick—as far as I can make out, that there ’s a way the whole school has of knowing if a boat so much as crosses the line between a whale and his slick. So, if a boat gets into the slick, or crosses that line, the whole school goes tearing to windward. It may be so,” he added, shaking his head. “I don’t say it ain’t, for you hear of many curious things at sea that turn out to be true, but it seems a trifle too much like magic to me. So I say that I don’t know anything about it, and that ’s true enough. I don’t.”
I laughed. To me it seemed like a fairy tale; but, as Peter had said, you hear of many curious things at sea which turn out to be true, and this might be one of them. If it is true I can think of no possible explanation. I do not know the truth of the matter to this day.
A few days later we sighted another spout. Mr. Brown and Mr. Baker lowered for him, for they said that the Prince and Starbuck ought to have another chance. This was a lone whale, which very obligingly waited for us to come up with him, and both boats got fast. He put up no fight at all, and in a quarter of an hour he lay fin out. This was the sort of thing that disgusted me with whaling, and made it seem nothing more than a bloody, dirty business, which tended to brutalize the men who took part in it. A whale should be willing—determined—to fight for his life, if it was worth anything to him. A fight made it all worth while, and the better the fight the more worth while it seemed, to me, at any rate. The prospect of a good fight always did fill me with elation, in spite of myself. I confess that it does even now, in spite of my age and experience, which has been acquired uniformly in the avoidance of fights; but any kind of a fight seems good to me, in my heart of hearts. It is a reprehensible instinct, but it is just as surely an instinct as it is reprehensible according to our modern code.