With the words he snatched up the iron at his side, and hurled it downward with all his strength into the head of the whale, where it stuck quivering. At the same time Harry, yelling like mad in his excitement, caught up the bomb gun, put it to his shoulder as if it were a toy, and discharged it full into the middle of the black mass, which he saw as through a mist heaving in the crushed ice. There was a dull, heavy sound of a muffled explosion, and the whale quivered and stopped. Then came a wild hurrah from the ship, and an answering one from the boats. The boatswain sprang up the short ladder from amidships to their side.
“Mighty good, young fellers,” he shouted, almost as excited as they; “you plunked him fair, and just one chance out of a thousand. Whoop! but we’re a whaling crew. Greenhorn bagged the first bull right from the quarter deck. Whoop!”
The bowhead lay motionless, evidently dead, and the boatswain made the line fast to a cleat. Then he sang a variation of an old sea chantey, cutting a ponderous pigeon wing to the tune—
“Tra la la, tra la la, tra la la boom,
Lorenzo was no sailor,
Tra la la, tra la la, tra la la boom,
He shipped on board a whaler.”
“’Vast there, bosun,” he said to himself, suddenly sober; “no monkeyshines on the quarter-deck. Get down amidships where you belong. Hi there, you Kanakas! clear away that cuttin’-in gear. Step lively now, they’re alongside.”
The boats were no sooner at the davits than preparations for cutting-in the whale were made. He was hauled alongside, head toward the stern, and a heavy tackle was rigged to the mainmast head. Then the cutting-in stage of planking, rigged so as to swing from the side of the ship out over the carcass, was put outboard. Two men, each with the great steel chisel which the whalemen call a spade, took stations on this. A longitudinal slit was cut in the blubber just back of the flipper. Then cuts were made from this round the carcass, a hook from the tackle was made fast in the end of the strip, and hoisting away on the tackle the blubber was peeled from the dark meat beneath in a spiral peeling, somewhat as one might peel an apple. As the weight on the tackle grew great, the strip was cut away and hoisted upon the deck amidships. Meanwhile, others of the crew had started fires beneath the great kettles forward, and the blubber, cut into small cubes, was put in these. At first this fire was of wood, but as the work progressed the scraps from the blubber were thrown into the grate and burned fiercely, giving off a thick black smoke that had a disagreeable odor of burnt flesh.
By and by the blubber was all aboard, filling the space between decks with its quivering oily masses, among which the crew plunged and worked like demons. The furnaces spouted smoke and oil, and remnants of blubber made the decks slippery. Last of all the tackle was carefully made fast to the head, and the ship listed to one side as the donkey engine put a strain on the great mass. Then the great backbone was severed by the spades, and the tense tackle sang as the enormous bulk was swung inboard and landed safely on the deck.