We lowered two boats, and pulled to the spot. There was a gentle little breeze, and both boats put up their sails and sailed to and fro, waiting for him to come up. I was enjoying myself thoroughly, and did not care if he never came up. Indeed, we began to think he never would. It got to be an hour since he had gone down, and there was no sign of him. Then an hour and five minutes, and we lowered the sail and unstepped the mast. This was hardly done when he appeared silently, an eighth of a mile away, heading toward us. We were in an excellent situation, for as he was coming on, and could not see us, there was nothing for us to do but wait for him.
He continued to forge ahead slowly, Mr. Baker’s boat, half a mile or more astern of him, pulling up as hard as the men could pull. The whale was to windward of us, and we could hear his spout plainly, loud and hoarse and deep-toned. It sounded like the exhaust of the Monohanset, the boat that ran between New Bedford and the Vineyard. We waited, our oars out, and still he came on blindly, steering a somewhat zigzag course, to enlarge his field of vision, and stopping now and then, with his head out of water, to listen.
He was pretty near us now, and the Prince was getting excited and impatient. He signalled Mr. Brown with his lips moving silently, to have the men pull a few strokes to lay us on, but Mr. Brown shook his head. Again the whale heaved his head out, almost within darting distance.
“Now, pull! A good stroke!”
We pulled with all our might. It was only about thirty feet that we had to go. We ranged alongside of his head, and he was very plainly trying to make out what the noise was, and where it came from. The moment we came within his field of sight he began to settle. There was no other possible escape; but he was not quick enough, and the Prince planted one iron deep in his shoulder, just above his fin. The whale had settled too deep for the second iron, which did not bite at all. By the time both irons had been let go we were backing off.
That whale immediately lost all signs of leisureliness and laziness, and went down so fast that it was all we could do to keep the line whipping clear out of the tub. The end of that tub was approaching rapidly, and the other tub was bent on as fast as a man could work. Still there was no sign of slackening in the speed of sounding, and the end of the second tub, too, was not far off.
“The drug!” was the cry. “Drug, there! Hurry!”
The drug, or drag, was hastily passed. Our drags were of two pieces of plank, crossed, and bolted securely together, with a loop of whale line through the centre. On the opposite side from the loop a strong, stubby staff projected about a foot. It was meant that a piece of canvas should be fastened to the staff. The canvas might survive dragging through the water, and would make the drag more conspicuous on the surface; but there was none on our drags that day. There seldom was any.
The end of the line in a tub is always exposed for just such occasions, and our second tub of line was hastily bent on to the loop of the drag, and the drag held clear, ready to go overboard. This was scarcely done when the last coil of line snapped out of the tub, and the drug made a bee line for the bottom of the sea. We lay there helpless, without a foot of whale line in the boat, and our whale—nobody knew where he was exactly, but somewhere under us, from one to two hundred fathoms deep. A line will follow all the windings of its course under water, very nearly, and the whale might have turned at some depth, and the line still go straight down.
That must have been just what this whale did, as it turned out, for he rose soon after, about a quarter of a mile away, and made off just a little faster than the boats could go, although we tried hard. The drug appeared some minutes after the whale had shown himself, and went skittering off after him, jumping from sea to sea, or from one side to the other, tantalizingly near. Both boats followed it. It did not go very much faster than we did, pulling our hearts out for an hour dead to windward; but it gained on us very slowly, and we gave it up at last, and lay on our oars, while we watched that drug flash in the sun, farther and farther away. It flashed its last, and we turned and pulled back to the ship, leaving the whale in possession of two good harpoons, almost two hundred fathoms of nearly new whale line, and a perfectly good drug, a work of art. I hoped he would enjoy their use. We never heard anything more of any of them. Possibly, even now, there is a whale, fairly old, swimming the seas somewhere, with an old rusty harpoon encysted in his shoulder, the remains of a frayed old line trailing from it, fringed with green or brown trailing weed along its whole length, encrusted with barnacles, and alive with little crabs and sea-horses. I am confident that he has never been taken.