Fighting the Whales by Robert Michael Ballantyne (best classic books TXT) 📖

came floating over the black water, and died away in the breeze.

The single word "Hurrah!" burst from our throats with all the power of our lungs, and we bent to our oars till we well-nigh tore the rollocks out of the boat.

"Hold hard! stern all!" roared the mate, as we went flying down to leeward, and almost ran over the hen-coop, to which a human form was seen to be clinging with the tenacity of a drowning man. We had swept down so quickly that we shot past it. In an agony of fear lest my friend should be again lost in the darkness, I leaped up and sprang into the sea. Tom Lokins, however, had noticed what I was about; he seized me by the collar of my jacket, just as I reached the water, and held me with a grip like a vice till one of the men came to his assistance, and dragged me back into the boat. In a few moments more we reached the hen-coop, and Fred was saved!

He was half dead with cold and exhaustion, poor fellow, but in a few minutes he began to recover, and before we reached the ship he could speak. His first words were to thank God for his deliverance. Then he added--

"And, thanks to the man that flung that light overboard. I should have gone down but for that. It showed me where the hen-coop was."

I cannot describe the feeling of joy that filled my heart when he said this.

"Ay, who wos it that throw'd that fire overboard?" inquired one of the men.

"Don't know," replied another, "I think it wos the cap'n."

"You'll find that out when we get aboard," cried the mate; "pull away, lads."

In five minutes Fred Borders was passed up the side and taken down below. In two minutes more we had him stripped naked, rubbed dry, wrapped in hot blankets, and set down on one of the lockers, with a hot brick at his feet.


CHAPTER SIX.

THE WHALE--FIGHTING BULLS, ETCETERA.

As the reader may, perhaps, have been asking a few questions about the whale in his own mind, I shall try to answer them, by telling a few things concerning that creature which, I think, are worth knowing.

In the first place, the whale is not a fish! I have applied that name to it, no doubt, because it is the custom to do so; but there are great differences between the whales and the fishes. The mere fact that the whale lives in water is not sufficient to prove it to be a fish. The frog lives very much in water--he is born in the water, and, when very young, he lives in it altogether--would die, in fact, if he were taken out of it; yet a frog is not a fish.

The following are some of the differences existing between a whale and a fish:--

The whale is a warm-blooded animal; the fish is cold-blooded. The whale brings forth its young alive; while most fishes lay eggs or spawn. Moreover, the fish lives entirely under water, but the whale cannot do so. He breathes air through enormous lungs, not gills. If you were to hold a whale's head under water for much longer than an hour, it would certainly be drowned; and this is the reason why it comes so frequently to the surface of the sea to take breath. Whales seldom stay more than an hour under water, and when they come up to breathe, they discharge the last breath they took through their nostrils or blow-holes, mixed with large quantities of water, which they have taken in while feeding. But the most remarkable point of difference between the whale and fishes of all kinds is, that it suckles its young.

The calf of one kind of whale is about fourteen feet long when it is born, and it weighs about a ton. The cow-whale usually has only one calf at a time, and the manner in which she behaves to her gigantic baby shows that she is affected by feelings of anxiety and affection such as are never seen in fishes, which heartless creatures forsake their eggs when they are laid, and I am pretty sure they would not know their own children if they happened to meet with them.

The whale, on the contrary, takes care of her little one, gives it suck, and sports playfully with it in the waves; its enormous heart throbbing all the while, no doubt, with satisfaction.

I have heard of a whale which was once driven into shoal water with its calf and nearly stranded. The huge dam seemed to become anxious for the safety of her child, for she was seen to swim eagerly round it, embrace it with her fins, and roll it over in the waves, trying to make it follow her into deep water. But the calf was obstinate; it would not go, and the result was that the boat of a whaler pulled up and harpooned it. The poor little whale darted away like lightning on receiving the terrible iron, and ran out a hundred fathoms of line; but it was soon overhauled and killed. All this time the dam kept close to the side of its calf, and not until a harpoon was plunged into her own side would she move away. Two boats were after her. With a single rap of her tail she cut one of the boats in two, and then darted off. But in a short time she turned and came back. Her feelings of anxiety had returned, no doubt, after the first sting of pain was over, and she died at last, close to the side of her young one.

There are various kinds of whales, but the two sorts that are most sought after are the common whale of the Greenland Seas, which is called the "right whale," and the sperm whale of the South Sea. Both kinds are found in the south; but the sperm whale never goes to the North Seas. Both kinds grow to an enormous size--sometimes to seventy feet in length, but there is considerable difference in their appearance, especially about the head. In a former chapter I have partly described the head of a _right_ whale, which has whalebone instead of teeth, with its blow-holes on the back of the head. The sperm whale has large white teeth in its lower-jaw and none at all in the upper. It has only one blow-hole, and that a little one, much farther forward on its head, so that sailors can tell, at a great distance, what kind of whales they see, simply by their manner of spouting.

The most remarkable feature about the sperm whale is the bluntness of its clumsy head, which looks somewhat like a big log with the end sawn square off, and this head is about one-third of its entire body.

The sperm whale feeds differently from the right whale. He seizes his prey with his powerful teeth, and lives, to a great extent, on large cuttlefish. Some of them have been seen to vomit lumps of these cuttlefish as long as a whale-boat. He is much fiercer, too, than the right whale, which almost always takes to flight when struck, but the sperm whale will sometimes turn on its foes, and smash their boat with a blow of his blunt head or tail.

Fighting-whales, as they are called, are not uncommon. These are generally old bulls, which have become wise from experience, and give the whalers great trouble--sometimes carrying away several harpoons and lines. The lower-jaw of one old bull of this kind was found to be sixteen feet long, and it had forty-eight teeth, some of them a foot long. A number of scars about his head showed that this fellow had been in the wars. When two bull-whales take to fighting, their great effort is to catch each other by the lower-jaw, and, when locked together, they struggle with a degree of fury that cannot be described.

It is not often that the sperm whale actually attacks a ship; but there are a few cases of this kind which cannot be doubted. The following story is certainly true; and while it shows how powerful a creature the whale is, it also shows what terrible risk and sufferings the whaleman has frequently to encounter.

In the month of August 1819, the American whale-ship _Essex_ sailed from Nantucket for the Pacific Ocean. She was commanded by Captain Pollard. Late in the autumn of the same year, when in latitude 40 degrees of the South Pacific, a shoal, or "school," of sperm whales was discovered, and three boats were immediately lowered and sent in pursuit. The mate's boat was struck by one of the fish during the chase, and it was found necessary to return to the ship to repair damages.

While the men were employed at this, an enormous whale suddenly rose quite close to the ship. He was going at nearly the same rate with the ship--about three miles an hour; and the men, who were good judges of the size of whales, thought that it could not have been less than eighty-five feet long. All at once he ran against the ship, striking her bows, and causing her to tremble like a leaf. The whale immediately dived and passed under the ship, and grazed her keel in doing so. This evidently hurt his back, for he suddenly rose to the surface about fifty yards off, and commenced lashing the sea with his tail and fins as if suffering great agony. It was truly an awful sight to behold that great monster lashing the sea into foam at so short a distance.

In a short time he seemed to recover, and started off at great speed to windward. Meanwhile the men discovered that the blow received by the ship had done her so much damage, that she began to fill and settle down at the bows; so they rigged the pumps as quickly as possible. While working them one of the men cried out--

"God have mercy! he comes again!"

This was too true. The whale had turned, and was now bearing down on them at full speed, leaving a white track of foam behind him. Rushing at the ship like a battering-ram, he hit her fair on the weather bow, and stove it in, after which he dived and disappeared. The horrified men took to their boats at once, and in _ten minutes_ the ship went down.

The condition of the men thus left in three open boats far out upon the sea, without provisions or shelter, was terrible indeed. Some of them perished, and the rest, after suffering the severest hardships, reached a low island called Ducies, on the 20th of December. It was a mere sand-bank, which supplied them only with water and seafowl. Still even this was a mercy, for which they had reason to thank God; for in cases of this kind one of the evils that seamen have most cause to dread is the want of water.

Three of the men resolved to remain on this sand-bank, for dreary and uninhabited though it was, they preferred to take their chance of being picked up by a passing ship rather than run the risks of crossing the wide ocean in open boats, so their companions