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

bade them a sorrowful farewell, and left them. But this island is far out of the usual track of ships. The poor fellows have never since been heard of.

It was the 27th of December when the three boats left the sand-bank with the remainder of the men, and began a voyage of two thousand miles, towards the island of Juan Fernandez. The mate's boat was picked up, about three months after, by the ship _Indian_ of London, with only three living men in it. About the same time the captain's boat was discovered, by the _Dauphin_ of Nantucket, with only two men living; and these unhappy beings had only sustained life by feeding on the flesh of their dead comrades. The third boat must have been lost, for it was never heard of; and out of the whole crew of twenty men, only five returned home to tell their eventful story.

Before resuming the thread of my narrative, I must not omit to mention, that in the head of the sperm whale there is a large cavity or hole called the "case," which contains pure oil that does not require to be melted, but can be bailed at once into casks and stowed away. This is the valuable spermaceti from which the finest candles are made. One whale will sometimes yield fifteen barrels of spermaceti oil from the "case" of its head. A large fish will produce from eighty to a hundred-barrels of oil altogether, sometimes much more; and when whalemen converse with each other, about the size of whales, they speak of "eighty-barrel fish," and so on.

Although I have written much about the fighting powers of the sperm whale, it must not be supposed that whales are by nature fond of fighting. On the contrary, the "right" whale is a timid creature, and never shows fight, except in defence of its young. And the sperm whale generally takes to flight when pursued. In fact, most of the accidents that happen to whalemen occur when the wounded monster is lashing the water in blind terror and agony.

The whale has three bitter enemies, much smaller, but much bolder than himself, and of these he is terribly afraid. They are the swordfish, the thrasher, and the killer. The first of these, the swordfish, has a strong straight horn or sword projecting from his snout, with which he boldly attacks and pierces the whale. The thrasher is a strong fish, twenty feet long, and of great weight. Its method of attack is to leap out of the water on the whale's back, and deal it a tremendous blow with its powerful tail.

The swordfish and thrasher sometimes act together in the attack; the first stabbing him below, and the second belabouring him above, while the whale, unable, or too frightened, to fight, rushes through the water, and even leaps its whole gigantic length into the air in its endeavours to escape. When a whale thus leaps his whole length out of the water, the sailors say he "breaches," and breaching is a common practice. They seem to do it often for amusement as well as from terror.

But the most deadly of the three enemies is the killer. This is itself a kind of small whale, but it is wonderfully strong, swift, and bold. When one of the killers gets into the middle, of a school of whales, the frightened creatures are seen flying in all directions. His mode of attack is to seize his big enemy by the jaw, and hold on until he is exhausted and dies.


CHAPTER SEVEN.

TOM'S WISDOM--ANOTHER GREAT BATTLE.

One day I was standing beside the windlass, listening to the conversation of five or six of the men, who were busy sharpening harpoons and cutting-knives, or making all kinds of toys and things out of whales' bones. We had just finished cutting-in and trying out our third whale, and as it was not long since we reached the fishing-ground, we were in high hopes of making a good thing of it that season; so that every one was in good spirits, from the captain down to the youngest man in the ship.

Tom Lokins was smoking his pipe, and Tom's pipe was an uncommonly black one, for he smoked it very often. Moreover, Tom's pipe was uncommonly short, so short that I always wondered how he escaped burning the end of his nose. Indeed, some of the men said that the redness of the end of Tom's nose was owing to its being baked like a brick by the heat of his pipe. Tom took this pipe from his mouth, and while he was pushing down the tobacco with the end of his little finger, he said--

"D'ye know, lads, I've been thinkin'--"

"No, have ye?" cried one of the men, interrupting him with a look of pretended surprise. "Well now, I do think, messmates, that we should ax the mate to make a note o' that in the log, for it's not often that Tom Lokins takes to thinkin'."

There was a laugh at this, but Tom, turning with a look of contempt to the man who interrupted him, replied--

"I'll tell you wot it is, Bill Blunt, if all the thoughts that _you_ think, and especially the jokes that you utter, wos put down in the log, they'd be so heavy that I do believe they would sink the ship!"

"Well, well," cried Bill, joining in the laugh against himself, "if they did, _your_ jokes would be so light and triflin' that I do believe they'd float her again. But what have you been a-thinkin' of, Tom?"

"I've been thinkin'," said Tom slowly, "that if a whale makes his breakfast entirely off them little things that you can hardly see when you get 'em into a tumbler--I forget how the captain calls 'em--wot a _tree-mendous_ heap of 'em he must eat in the course of a year!"

"Thousands of 'em, I suppose," said one of the men.

"Thousands!" cried Tom, "I should rather say billions of them."

"How much is billions, mate?" inquired Bill.

"I don't know," answered Tom. "Never could find out. You see it's heaps upon heaps of thousands, for the thousands come first and the billions afterwards; but when I've thought uncommon hard, for a long spell at a time, I always get confused, because millions comes in between, d'ye see, and that's puzzlin'."

"I think I could give you some notion about these things," said Fred Borders, who had been quietly listening all the time, but never putting in a word, for, as I have said, Fred was a modest bashful man and seldom spoke much. But we had all come to notice that when Fred spoke, he had always something to say worth hearing; and when he did speak he spoke out boldly enough. We had come to have feelings of respect for our young shipmate, for he was a kind-hearted lad, and we saw by his conversation that he had been better educated than the most of us, so all our tongues stopped as the eyes of the party turned on him.

"Come, Fred, let's hear it then," said Tom.

"It's not much I have to tell," began Fred, "but it may help to make your minds clearer on this subject. On my first voyage to the whale-fishery (you know, lads, this is my second voyage) I went to the Greenland Seas. We had a young doctor aboard with us--quite a youth; indeed he had not finished his studies at college, but he was cleverer, for all that, than many an older man that had gone through his whole course. I do believe that the reason of his being so clever was, that he was for ever observing things, and studying them, and making notes, and trying to find out reasons. He was never satisfied with knowing a thing; he must always find out _why_ it was. One day I heard him ask the captain what it was that made the sea so green in some parts of those seas. Our captain was an awfully stupid man. So long as he got plenty of oil he didn't care two straws for the reason of anything. The young doctor had been bothering him that morning with a good many questions, so when he asked him what made the sea green, he answered sharply, `I suppose it makes itself green, young man,' and then he turned from him with a fling.

"The doctor laughed, and came forward among the men, and began to tell us stories and ask questions. Ah! he was a real hearty fellow; he would tell you all kinds of queer things, and would pump you dry of all you knew in no time. Well, but the thing I was going to tell you was this. One of the men said to him he had heard that the greenness of the Greenland Sea, was caused by the little things like small bits of jelly, on which the whales feed. As soon as he heard this he got a bucket and hauled some sea-water aboard, and for the next ten days he was never done working away with the sea-water; pouring it into tumblers and glasses; looking through it by daylight and by lamplight; tasting it, and boiling it, and examining it with a microscope."

"What's a microscope?" inquired one of the men.

"Don't you know?" said Tom Lokins, "why it's a glass that makes little things seem big, when ye look through it. I've heerd say that beasts that are so uncommon small that you can't see them at all are made to come into sight, and look quite big, by means o' this glass. But I can't myself say that it's true."

"But I can," said Fred, "for I have seen it with my own eyes. Well, after a good while, I made bold to ask the young doctor what he had found out.

"`I've found,' said he, `that the greenness of these seas is in truth caused by uncountable numbers of medusae--'"

"Ha! that's the word," shouted Tom Lokins, "Medoosy, that's wot the captain calls 'em. Heave ahead, Fred."

"Well, then," continued Fred, "the young doctor went on to tell me that he had been counting the matter to himself very carefully, and he found that in every square mile of sea-water there were living about eleven quadrillions, nine hundred and ninety-nine trillions of these little creatures!"

"Oh! hallo! come now!" we all cried, opening our eyes very wide indeed.

"But, I say, how much is that?" inquired Tom Lokins.

"Ah! that's just what I said to the young doctor, and he said to me, `I'll tell you what, Fred Borders, no man alive understands how much that is, and what's more, no man ever will; but I'll give you _some notion_ of what it means;' and so he told me how long it would take forty thousand men to count that number of eleven quadrillions, nine hundred and ninety-nine trillions, each man of the forty thousand beginning `one,' `two,' `three,' and going on till the sum of the whole added together would make it up. Now, how long d'ye think it would take them?--guess."

Fred Borders smiled as he said this, and looked round the circle of men.

"I know," cried one, "it would take the whole forty thousand a _week_ to do it."

"Oh! nonsense, they could do it