Whale Adventure

By Willard Price
Chapter 1

The bird with twenty wings

On all the hills of Honolulu people looked to the sea.
Spectators crowded the docks lining the harbour.

They were all gazing in the same direction. They paid no

attention to the steamers and yachts, cargo vessels and
tugs. They did not bother to glance at the helicopter passing
overhead, or the plane setting out for San Francisco.

These they could see any day.

They looked at something that seemed to have come from

another world. It was the kind of ship that used to take men
sailing and whaling a century ago.

It had no funnels, no black smoke, no grinding, growling

machinery. Its three masts towered more than a hundred
feet high. From them hung its twenty great sails, drying in
the still, sunny air. It looked like a huge bird about to fly
away.

‘A fine sight!’ said someone.

‘Didn’t think there were any of those old beauties left,’ said
another.

‘Beauty my eye,’ said a man who looked like a sailor.

‘You wouldn’t think she was such a beauty if you knew what
happens to the men who sail on her.’
‘Hope it isn’t too bad,’ said a new voice, ‘because we’re
going to sail on her.’

Tm sorry for you,’ said the sailor, and looked up at the

newcomer. He saw Hal Hunt, tall, well built, nineteen years
old, his deeply tanned face lit by a pleasant smile.

‘Well,’ admitted the sailor, ‘you look as if you could

take care of yourself. But I hope this kid isn’t going too.’

Roger bristled up and tried to look as big and tough

as his thirteen years would permit. He was about to

make a smart reply when Mr Scott cut in.

‘I don’t think well have any trouble,’ he said as he and the

two boys pressed on through the crowd.

The sailor shook his head doubtfully. But Hal and Roger felt
confidence in their older companion. Everything would be
all right so long as they were accompanied by the scientist,
Arthur Scott of the American Museum. Still, the sailor’s
remarks left them a bit uneasy. Reaching the edge of the
dock they climbed down a ladder into a waiting launch and
were taken out towards the great bird with the twenty white
wings. The closer they came the more uneasy they grew. For
the ship itself was not white and beautiful like its sails. It
was a black evil-looking hulk, and from it drifted the strong
smell of whale oil and rancid blubber.

Now the name of the bark could be seen on the stern and U
was not a pretty name. Killer was the name, and the home
port was St Helena.
‘She’s named after the killer-whale,’ said Mr Scott. ‘That’s
the most vicious and deadly of all the whales.’

‘Where is St Helena?’ asked Roger.

‘It’s an island far down in the South Atlantic It has always

been a great whaling port. Only fifty years ago you could see
as many as a hundred whaling ships in the harbour at one
time. And there were hundreds more in northern ports.’

‘Only fifty years?’ said Hal. T thought it was centuries ago.’

‘No - whaling under sail was not as ancient as you might

suppose. As late as 1907 New Bedford had a fleet of twenty-
two whalers. Of course, today the business has been taken
over by the big factory ships - but with the new demand for
whale products a few of the old sailing vessels have been
put back into service. That gives us a chance to see how
whaling used to be done. And that’s why the American
Museum wants me to make a complete record of the
operations and take motion pictures for the museum’s
library.’

‘Has the captain really agreed to take you?’

‘Yes. But he says he won’t sail until he can get two more
men. Two of his crew deserted - he has to fill their places.’

‘And that’s where we come in,’ said Hal.

‘Exactly. You’ve never sailed in a square-rigger, but he

probably wouldn’t be able to find anybody who has. You
know something about the sea, after sailing your own boat
all over the Pacific. Even Roger is not too young to be useful
as a mess-boy or lookout - there are dozens of jobs he could
do on a sailing ship.’
He glanced up at the savage black hulk of the Killer.

‘The only question is - do you want to go? I’m not going to

press you, and I don’t want any quick answer. It’s up to you.
I can tell you it’s hard work - so hard that crews accustomed
to the soft duties on a steamer won’t touch it. I can tell you,
too, that the captain looks to me like a bully and a brute.
That’s another reason he has trouble rinding men. I’m glad
you cabled your father and got his consent, because I can’t
be responsible for you. You’re on your own. After you’ve seen
the captain and looked over the ship you will have time to
back out if you want to.’

The launch hugged in under the black counter of the Killer.

Looking up from this point the sight was dizzying. Up they
looked to the gunwale over which a rope ladder dangled. Up
to the bottom of a lifeboat swinging from its davits. On up
the three masts, the mainmast and foremast, square-rigged,
the mizenmast carrying fore-and-aft sails in the manner of a
bark. Up past mainsail and foresail, topsails and topgallant
sails, royals and trysails, up to the lookout’s cage at the very
tip of the mainmast a good hundred and ten feet above
water.

Loving the sea as they did, they had many times studied
pictures and descriptions of the old square-riggers, but this
was the first time they had seen one. It gave them stomach-
butterflies to think of climbing those ratlines that went
skyward like narrow spider-webs, up, up to where the gently
swaying masthead seemed to scrape the clouds. If it made
them dizzy to look up, how would they feel looking down
from that unsteady basket, say in a storm, when the sway of
the mast would be anything but gentle?

‘Oh, a sailor’s life is a jolly life,’ sang Roger, but he was quite
out of tune and didn’t sound very convincing.
‘All right, over you go,’ said Scott.

The boys came out of their trance and scrambled up the

rope ladder, Scott following. They tumbled over the mil on to
the deck.

Was the ship on fire? Red flames shot up and white steam
filled the air. Men seemed to be fighting the fire. The boys
came closer. Now they could see that the fire was confined
inside a brick wall. Huge black pots, each big enough to hold
several men, rested in the flames. Men hauled great chunks
of meat as big as themselves across the deck and dumped
them into the pots.

‘Just trying-out,’ said Mr Scott. ‘That’s blubber. Blubber is the

whale’s overcoat. It’s very fat. They put the blubber into the
pots and cook the oil out of it. It’s called trying-out.’

The men, in ragged blood-and-oil-stained clothes and

unshaved beards, looked as rough as pirates. The roughest
and biggest of them gave orders. He noticed the newcomers
and walked growling towards them as if prepared to throw
them bodily off his ship. His eyes were large and bulging,
like big marbles; his mouth had a mean twist to starboard;
and his chin, covered with black bristles like porcupine
quills, projected forward like the prow of a pirate ship.

‘What do you want -‘ he began gruffly, then recognized Mr

Scott. ‘Oh, you’re the scientific fellow.’ He made an obvious
effort to be more polite. ‘Welcome aboard. Are you ready to
pay me for your passage?’

‘I am,’ said Mr Scott, producing from his breast pocket a

large roll of notes. ‘I believe that’s the price you asked for
three weeks’ passage.’
‘All that,’ exclaimed Hal, ‘for passage on this?’ At once he
realized be should not have said it. After all, it was none of
his business.

The captain glared. ‘Who’s this smart alec? What does he

know about the cost of running a ship? And how about all
the trouble I’m going to have with the science fellow
stumbling around in our way?’ He stuffed the money into his
trouser pocket and advanced upon HaL ‘By the Holy Harry, I
wish I had you in my crew. I’d trim you down to size I’

Hal did not flinch. He was as tall as the captain, not so

heavily built but perhaps just as wiry and strong.

‘Start trimming,’ he said with a smile, ‘because I think I’m

going to be in your crew.’

Mr Scott hastened to pour oil on troubled waters.

‘It’s my fault,’ he said. T should have begun with

introductions. Captain Grindle, this is Hal Hunt and his
brother Roger. You are short of two men - perhaps they will
sign on. They’ve had some sea experience. Of course, they
don’t know much about square-riggers.’

‘Nobody does,’ growled the captain.

‘But they will learn as fast as anyone you could pick up.
They’re used to roughing it. Their father is a famous
collector of animals for zoos and circuses. He has sent his
boys on various trips to collect wild animals, and on
scientific expeditions to teach them something about the
world we live in. They’d learn a lot on your ship.’

‘They would that,’ agreed the captain sourly. ‘I’d learn them
things they’d never forget. But I don’t know about taking on
a couple of gents.’
He spat out the word ‘gents’.

‘They’ll want special favours,’ he went on. ‘Believe me, they

won’t get them. They’ll sleep in the fo’c’sle with the crew.
They’ll eat what’s put before ‘em.

They’ll step lively or smart for it, and I don’t care if their
father is the King of Siam.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Hal. ‘Our father isn’t the King of Siam.
And we’re not “gents”. We want no favours.’

‘Like as not too soft for this kind of work,’ grumbled the
captain. ‘Let me see your hands.’

The four palms held out for his inspection were hard and
tough. The captain may have been surprised but he
wouldn’t admit it.

‘Soft as butter,’ he said scornfully. ‘You’ll have blisters as big

as plums before you’re on this ship a day. Oh well, if I can’t
get what I want I have to take what I can get. Come down
and sign on.’
Chapter 2

Two ‘gents’ on a whaler

Captain Grindle clumped down the steps to his cabin. Hal
and Roger, about to follow, were stopped by Mr Scott.

‘I like this fellow less and less,’ said Scott in a low voice. ‘I’ve
got to go with him - but you don’t have to. I’m sorry I got you
into this. Why don’t you just back out now before it’s too
late?’

Hal looked at Roger. He felt he could take what was coming,

but it would be harder on his younger brother.

‘It’s up to the boy,’ Hal said.

Roger, whose heart had sunk into his shoes at the thought
that they might after all miss this great adventure of sail?
and whales, was suddenly happy again.

‘K it’s up to me,’ he said, let’s go,’ and he led the way down
the steps.

On a table in the captain’s cabin lay the papers. Hal began

to look them over.

‘Come, come,’ said Captain Grindle impatiently. ‘Do you

think I have time to stand around while you read all the
small print? Sign and have done with it. I’m paying you a
one-three-hundredth lay.’

Hal knew the system of lays. Whalers got no wages. Each

got a share of the profits of the voyage. This share was
called a lay. Hal’s lay of one three-hundredth meant that if
the ship came back with three hundred gallons of whale oil
Hal would be paid the price of one gallon. It was a very small
lay.

‘And my brother?’ asked Hal.

The captain’s eyes flashed. ‘You don’t expect me to pay a

child! He goes as an apprentice. He gets nothing but his
food and bunk - and won’t be worth that.’

It didn’t seem fair to Roger. But he held his tongue. After all,
he was taking this trip for experience, not money. What
bothered him most was being called a child. Wasn’t he
thirteen years old and so big that some people took him for
fifteen or sixteen? He itched for a chance to show this
contemptuous captain that he was no child.

When the papers were signed the captain showed Mr Scott

his cabin, a small room next his own. ‘Really the first mate’s,’
he said. ‘But since I’ve got no first for this trip, you may have
it.’

He turned to the boys. ‘Go up and ask for Mr Durkins.

Second mate. He’ll tell you the difference between a clove
hitch and a donkey’s breakfast. And mind you learn fast.
You’ll be no use to me on a three weeks cruise if it takes you
three weeks to learn which end your head is screwed on. Get
your gear aboard this afternoon. We sail before dawn.’

‘Thank you,’ said Hal, going out of the door.

‘Wait a minute, young fella,’ bawled the captain. ‘The first

thing you want to learn is to say “sir” when you speak to an
officer.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Hal, and went on deck followed by
Roger.

They found Mr Durkins waiting for them. He was as rough as

gravel but he had a ready smile.

‘I usually get the job of showing the greenies the ropes,’ he

said. ‘First you might like to see where you bunk.’

He led the way forward and down the hatch into the fo’c’sle.

It was dark. There were no portholes. The only light came

from two sputtering whale-oil lamps. They also sent out
black smoke and nauseating fumes.

There were other smells, walls of them, waves of them,

smells so strong that they seemed like something solid that
could only be cut through with a hatchet or a knife. Clothes
hanging from pegs stank of dead whales. There was no
ventilation except through the half-opened hatch. That
would be closed in rough weather. There was a smell of
mouldy rags and mildewed boots and unwashed bodies and
decayed food. And the heat made all the smells more
suffocating.

‘Here’s where you doss down,’ said the mate, indicating two
bunks, one above the other.

Hal examined the bunks. The thin pad lay on wooden

boards. There were no springs, no bedding, no pillow. ‘How
about blankets?’ Hal asked. ‘Blankets! Man alive, this is the
tropics. You’re lucky to get a donkey’s breakfast.’

Roger remembered the captain had said something about a

donkey’s breakfast. ‘What’s a donkey’s breakfast?’ he asked.
‘This pad.’ ‘Why do they call it a donkey’s breakfast?’
‘I don’t know. Because it’s stuffed with straw, I guess.’

‘A pretty slim breakfast,’ said Hal, pinching the edge of the

pad. It was not quite an inch thick. The boards would feel
pretty hard through it.

‘Good for your back,’ laughed the mate. ‘Why, they tell me
the best people sleep on boards these days. The doctors are
all for it. ‘Course, nothin’ but the best would satisfy Cap
Grindle.’ He laughed again. ‘The best boards, the best brig,
and the best cat.’

The brig, Hal knew, was the jail, and the cat must be the cat-
o’-nine-tails or whip used to flog unruly sailors.

‘You’re joking about the cat,’ Hal said. T suppose that isn’t
used any more. The law doesn’t allow it.’

This struck the mate as very funny.

‘The law,’ he said, between gasps of laughter. ‘The law, you

say! Believe you me, the captain makes his own law on this
ship.’ He stopped laughing and his face suddenly took on a
look of savage ferocity. In an instant he was changed from a
carefree sailor into a snarling animal. He glanced up at the
open hatch, then lowered his voice to a harsh whisper.

‘You may as well know about it now,’ he said. ‘You’ll learn

soon enough. Why does ol’ man Grindle have trouble getting
men? Why did those two desert? Why is he willing to take on
greenies like you? Because he needs new feed for his cat,
that’s why. Scarce a man on board who hasn’t felt it. Even
the first mate - that’s why he quit. See here.’

He switched off his shirt. His back was ribbed with purple

welts standing up a quarter of an inch high. At points the
skin was still broken and festering.
‘But why do you stand it?’ asked Hal. ‘You could report it to
the Honolulu police. Why don’t you all desert?’

‘Listen, chum, you don’t understand. We been out a year

already from St Helena. We get no wages - just a lay - and
that isn’t paid till we get home; Them as desert now lose
everything they’ve earned. D’ye wonder a man thinks twice
before he deserts? No, there are only two things we can do.
One is to be patient-like till we get home.’

Hal waited for him to go on. When he did not, Hal prompted:

‘And what’s the other thing you can do?’

Durkins cast a look round at the empty bunks. ‘Walls have

ears,’ he said. ‘And you have ears, and how do I know I can
trust ‘em? What’s the other thing we can do? Use your
imagination. No harm in that - but remember I didn’t say
anything.’

Mutiny. The word stood out as plainly as if he had shouted it

at the top of his lungs. Not for nothing had the boys read
innumerable stories of mutiny on the high seas. Here
conditions were prime for mutiny. The captain, without a first
officer to back him up, stood alone against a disgruntled
crew. If he were put out of the way they might sail the ship
to some smugglers’ lair, sell the whale oil and the ship itself
and divide the proceeds.

But could such a thing happen in this day and age? The
boys knew it could happen and did happen. Even during
their own brief voyaging of the Pacific, from San Francisco to
Japan and back through the South Seas, several mutinies
had been reported.

The Pacific, they knew, is a still unconquered ocean. It is

bigger than the whole land surface of the globe. It is
sprinkled with more than twenty-five thousand islands,

half of them uninhabited.

It is the paradise of both honest men and rascals. So much

of it is so far from police stations and law-courts that men do
as they please or as they must. And men who choose to
disappear may hide in its vast distances more effectively
than in the thickest jungles of Africa.

Hal reflected that this voyage might turn out to be even

more of an adventure than he had expected.

‘Now I’ll show you topside,’ said the mate, and they climbed
to the deck. The clean fresh air seemed like a tonic after the
hot stink of the fo’c’sle.

‘You’ve got to know the names of things,’ said the mate, ‘so
when you’re told to man the downhaul you won’t lay hold of
a halyard, and all like that. Now then, you know the three
masts - the foremast, mainmast, and mizenmast. The
horizontal spars the sails hang from are the yards. When you
roll up the sails that’s reefing ‘em, and you tie them tight
with those little strings called gaskets -‘

He went on to point out and describe all the complicated

gear of the most complicated of sailing ships -lifts, clews,
bunts, braces, tacks, sheets, shrouds, ratlines, rings,
crosstrees, foot-ropes, buoy-ropes, wheel-ropes, belaying
pins, catheads, forestays, backstays, booms, sprits, davits,
and so on and on, concluding with twenty different sails,
each with its own particular name.

As he talked he kept glancing at them with a sly grin. He

was having a good time at their expense. He thought they
didn’t know what he was talking about. Finally he said:
‘There, I’ll bet you can’t remember half of what I’ve told you.
What’s that sail?’

‘Spanker.’ The boys spoke together.

‘And that one?’

‘Gaff-topsyl.’

‘What’s the difference between a martingale boom and a

whisker boom?’

He got the right answer.

He went on with a complete cross-examination. The boys

made some mistakes, but thanks to their keen interest in
sailing, their schooner experience, and much reading, their
percentage of error was small.

‘Not bad,’ Durkins had to admit. Then, as if fearing that the

boys might be too pleased with themselves, he went on:

‘But it’s one thing to name ‘em and another thing to use
‘em. Wait till you try reefing sails in a storm a hundred feet
above deck - or rowing one of those little boats out and
tackling a whale that can smash your craft to smithereens
with one flick of his tail. Then you’ll find out what it takes to
be a whaler.’
Chapter 3

Captain Grindle amuses himself

Roger floated above the clouds.

They seemed like clouds, the twenty white sails that

billowed beneath him.

He was in the ‘rings’, a sort of basket or crow’s-nest at the

top of the mainmast. A hundred feet down was the deck of
the Killer, but he could not see it. He could see nothing
below him but the white clouds of canvas. For a while he was
alone, soaring through the sky like a bird or a plane, white
clouds below him and more white clouds, real ones, above.

Not quite alone. One man shared his heaven. In the rings at
the head of the foremast stood Jiggs, one of the crew. He,
too, could not see the ship beneath. But he was not there to
look at the ship. Both he and Roger were posted as lookouts
to watch for whales.

There they stood, only thirty feet apart, but with an

impassable canyon between them. It was as if they were
each perched on a mountain-top separated by a deep valley
filled with cloud. The cloud ended only a few feet below
them and it was easy to imagine that you could walk across
this white floor from the head of the mainmast to the head of
the foremast. But when you remembered that the floor was
not reliable and would treacherously let you plunge to your
death on the deck a hundred feet below, it made your head
swim and hands grip the rail of your dizzy basket.
Of course, it was the basket that was dizzy - Roger wouldn’t
admit that he was. The basket was going round in circles.
The sea was fairly smooth, but there was enough of a swell
to roll the ship slightly from side to side and make it lazily
heave and pitch.

Those on deck might not notice the motion, but a movement

of a few inches there was exaggerated to many feet at the
masthead. So it was that Roger was spun round and round
until he began to have a distinctly uncomfortable feeling in
the pit of his stomach.

This was his first day of whaling. The Killer had left Honolulu
at dawn. After their interview with Captain Grindle the boys
and Mr Scott had gone ashore for their gear. There Scott had
said goodbye to his colleague, Sinclair, who had been
unable to go with him on the Killer because the captain had
insisted that one ‘science fellow’ was enough to bother with.
Hal and Roger had said their own goodbyes to their friends
on the schooner Lively Lady, on which they had sailed the
far Pacific. The schooner was still under charter by the
American Museum, and the skipper, Captain Ike, and the
Polynesian boy, Ohio, would look after it until the return of
the Killer in three weeks.

The first night on board had not been too happy. The first
surprise came at dinner-time.

There was no dining-saloon for the crew, not even a table.

The men formed in line and walked past a small window in
the wall of the galley (kitchen). Through this window the
cook thrust out to each man a pan of meat and beans and a
chunk of hardtack (ship-biscuit).

Then you could look for a place to sit down. Of course, there
were no chairs. You might sit on the fo’c’sle head, or on a
hatch cover, or on the deck itself.

Or you could eat standing up. This was not too bad because
the eating did not take long. It was not the sort of food you
would linger over. You got it down as fast as possible. In five
minutes it was stowed away.

As for the hardtack, it was well named. It was so hard that

the best teeth could scarcely make a dent in it, and most of
the men threw their biscuits overside or tried to hit the gulls
and terns that wheeled above the ship.

Having emptied their pans the boys were about to take them
back to the galley when a sailor prompted:

‘Clean ‘em first.’

‘Where’s the water?’ Hal asked.’

‘Water my hat!’ exclaimed the sailor. ‘What do you think this

is, a bloomin’ yacht? You’ll be lucky if you get enough water
to drink - there’s none to spare for washin’.’

He pulled some rope-yarn from his pocket. It was a tangled

mass almost as fluffy as absorbent cotton. He wiped his pan,
then threw the sticky wad into the sea. He gave some of the
yarn to the boys and they followed the same procedure.
Then they returned their pans at the galley window.

‘You’ll soon get the hang of it,’ said the sailor who had
supplied them with the rope-yarn. ‘My name’s Jimson. Any
time you get stuck, perhaps I can help you out.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ said Hal, and introduced himself and his

brother. ‘But I don’t understand it. Here we are still in
harbour - there surely ought to be plenty of fresh water on
board.’
“And so there is,’ agreed Jimson. ‘But you never know when
you leave port on one of these sailing tubs how long it will
be before you make port again. You’re pretty much at the
mercy of wind and weather. ‘Course, you could fill up the
hold with tanks of water, but then what would you do for
space to store your whale oil? And, believe me, the skipper
puts whale oil before water. Whale oil means money, water
only means lives. If it came right down to it, I’m sure he’d
rather have a few of us go raving mad o’thirst than crawl
back into port with a light load o’ oil.’

‘But you must use water to wash your clothes,’ Hal said.

‘We do - but not fresh water. Come back and I’ll show you.
There’s our clothes-line.’ He pointed to a coil of rope beside
a barrel. ‘Once we get moving we’ll soak our dirty clothes in
that barrel - it contains a weak acid solution - then we’ll tie
them to the end of that line and throw it overboard. We’ll
drag that bundle of clothes through the sea for two or three
days, and when we haul it out I’ll bet the clothes will be as
clean as if you had put them through one of those
newfangled washing-machines. Of course, there may be a
few holes in them where the sharks have closed then’ jaws
on them.’

“Do the sharks ever tear them off that line?’

“No. One taste, and they let them go. That’s what usually
happens. But a couple o’ months ago one fool of a shark
swallowed the whole bundle. Probably there was some blood
on the cloth that made him think it was edible. That shark
must have been real surprised when be found he couldn’t
get away. He was towed behind the ship nobody knows how
long until someone noticed him floundering about and
hauled him in. We opened him up and there were our
clothes. They had to be dragged another three days to get
the shark-smell out of them.’

The boys did very little sleeping that night. They could not
make their bones comfortable on the hard boards of their
bunks, and they were too excited by their new surroundings
and the trip before them.

There were about twenty other men in the room, some trying
to sleep, others sitting on the edges of their bunks talking
and smoking. The smoke from their cigarettes and pipes, the
fumes from the whale-oil lamps, the smell of blood and
blubber and bilge-water - all this plus the heat made
breathing difficult. The boys were not sorry when at four in
the morning the second mate bellowed down through the
hatch:

‘All hands on deck!’

In the grey light of dawn the Killer sailed from Honolulu. On

the right lay Pearl Harbor, scene of death and destruction
when Japan entered the Second World War. As if to balance
this place of terrible memory, on the left was one of the
loveliest and happiest spots in the world -the long curve of
Waikiki Beach and bold Diamond Head wearing the pink
halo of approaching sunrise.

Roger, standing by the rail enjoying the view, was roused by

a kick in the rear that almost lifted him from the deck. He
turned, fighting mad, clenching his fists for battle. The
bulging eyes of Captain Grindle glared down at him.

‘I’ll have nobody loafing on this ship,’ growled the captain.

‘Sorry, sir, I was just waiting for orders.’

‘You’ll get your orders in the seat of your pants if you don’t
step lively.’ He looked round with a sly grin. ‘I’ll find you
something to do.’ He scanned the deck for a job that would
be hard enough, something that would tax the strength and
courage of a young boy. Finally he glanced up the swaying
mast.

Roger hoped he would not be sent aloft. Not just now. Some
other time he would like it, but now he felt a little faint for
loss of sleep and his breakfast of overripe meat had not
agreed with him. The captain seemed to guess the boy’s
uneasiness.

That’s the place for you,’ he laughed savagely. ‘Up in the

rings, and be quick about it. Jiggs is up the foremast. You
shinny up the main. All the way to the peak. And you’re not
going up there to look at the view. Watch for whales, and if
you see a spout sing out. Let’s see how sharp your eyes are.
If you spot a whale before Jiggs does I’ll let you come down.
If you don’t, you’ll stay there until you do, and I don’t care if
it takes a week. Got no use for babes on deck. Get up there
into your cradle, and I hope it rocks you sick.’

Roger was half-way up the ratlines to the first platform

before this speech was finished. He had never climbed
anything so unsteady as this wobbling rope ladder. He would
be glad to reach the solid safety of the first platform, or ‘top’,
as it was called.

He was about to go through the opening in the platform

when another bellow came from below.

‘Not through the lubber’s hole,’ roared the captain. I’ll have
no lubbers on this ship. Up around by the futtock shrouds.’

Perhaps he hoped to confuse the boy. But Roger knew that

the hole he had been about to pass through was called the
lubber’s hole. And he knew the futtock shrouds were those
iron rods fastened at one end to the mast and at the other to
the outer edge of the platform. To climb them he must leave
the rope ladder and go up hand over hand with the skill of a
monkey, while his feet dangled in space.

Half-way up a lurch of the vessel loosened his grip and he

hung suspended by one hand, swinging like a pendulum in a
grandfather’s clock.

A roar of laughter came from below. The captain was

thoroughly enjoying himself. Several of the crew had
gathered now, but they did not join in the laughter. Hal
started up the ratlines to the relief of his brother. A sharp
order from the captain stopped him.

Every time the windjammer swayed to starboard Roger was

directly over the try-pots in which blubber from the last
whale catch was still boiling. If he fell into one of these great
steaming vats the comedy would turn to tragedy. But it
would still be comedy to the warped mind of Captain
Grindle. A wide grin made the porcupine bristles on his chin
and cheeks stand out like spears as his eyes passed from the
clinging figure to the try-pots and back again. The steam
curled up like a snake around the hanging body. Hal edged
close to the pots. If the boy fell he might catch him, or at
least yank him from the boiling oil in time to save his life.

There came a gasp of relief from the crew and a

disappointed grunt from the captain when a list to port
swung Roger against the shroud, which he was now able to
grip with both hands and his feet as well. He clung there
trembling for an instant, then slowly inched his way up over
the edge of the top and collapsed on the platform.
A cheer rose from the crew. It was checked at once by the
harsh voice of Captain Grindle.

‘You varmint! Is this a time to take a nap? I’ll wake you up.’

He seized a belaying-pin and flung it upward with all his

great strength. It struck the underside of the top with a
resounding whack.

Roger struggled to his feet. He stood swaying dizzily, one

arm round the mast.

The crash of the belaying-pin had brought Mr Scott up from

his cabin. He turned to Hal.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Just a big bully having some fun,’ said Hal bitterly. ‘Grindle
ordered Roger into the rings. Wouldn’t let him go through
the lubber’s hole. Nothing would have pleased the brute
better than to see him drop into the try-pots and get boiled
in oil.’

The captain, cursing, grabbed another belaying-pin and

hurled it aloft. His aim was good. The heavy wooden club
passed through the lubber’s hole and struck Roger on the
elbow.

Hal and Mr Scott at once began to force their way through

the crowd, determined to overpower the captain. The men
opened a path to let them through. They were eager to see
someone challenge the authority of the master.

The captain saw the two men coming. His eyes shone with
evil pleasure and his hand went back to his hip where a
revolver rested in its holster.
Then the way was suddenly blocked by the sailor called
Jimson. Hal and Scott found themselves held firmly in the
grip of the big seaman.

‘Stop it, you fools!’ said Jimson in a voice just above a

rasping, whisper. ‘You’ll get yourselves killed. You’ll only
make it worse for the kid.’ Then he leaned close to Hal’s ear,
making sure that the captain should not overhear him. ‘This
ain’t the time. The time is coming, but it ain’t now.’

Captain Grindle, seeing that he was not to be attacked,

roared with laughter.

‘What’s the matter, gents?’ he cried scornfully. ‘Why don’t

you come on? The welcome mat is out. Reception committee
is waiting. Step right up, gents - tea will be served.’ He spun
his revolver around two fingers. ‘Pink tea. Will you have
lemon or cream? I’ll send a cup aloft to your baby brother.’

He fired a shot into the air, not directly at Roger but close
enough so that the boy, who was once more climbing the
ratlines, heard the whistle of the bullet.

Again Hal and Scott struggled to get at the captain, but

several of the crew held them back. Again Jimson whispered
harshly: ‘This ain’t the time. The time is coming, but this
ain’t it.’

‘Cowards and softies!’ cried the captain. T got nothing but

cowards and softies on my ship. The whole pack o’ ye
wouldn’t dare face up to a real man. Now get for’ard and be
quick about it.’ He fired two shots over their heads. The men
retired sullenly towards the fo’c’sle.

Roger, leaving the top behind him, was climbing higher. For
the platform called the ‘top’ is not the top. It is only the head
of the lower section of the mast. Two-thirds of the mast rise
above it.

Roger thought the mast would never end. He felt like Jack
climbing the beanstalk that reached all the way up to
another world. He could not use his right arm. The blow from
the belaying-pin had not broken any bones, but it had so
bruised the elbow that he could not straighten or flex the
arm without acute pain.

He tacked the hand within his belt and held to the ratlines
with his left hand only. At every rise he must release his grip
and transfer his hand to the next higher rung. This might
have been easy to do on a wooden ladder, but on a ladder of
rope that swung here and there like a loose cobweb at every
motion of the ship he was in constant danger of clutching at
a rung which was no longer where he had just seen it.

Every near-miss brought a snort of laughter from Captain

Grindle, who was now Roger’s sole audience. Nothing would
so tickle the captain’s distorted sense of humour as to see
the young ‘gent’ come to grief.

Roger was determined not to give him that satisfaction. He

would not fall, and he would not fail. He was going to reach
the rings.

Every time he looked up at them they seemed as far away as

ever. It was as if the more he climbed the more an invisible
hand drew them a bit higher. At times he must stop and do
nothing but cling for his life, as a gust of wind caught his
cobweb and whipped it about.

At last he crawled up into the rings, and felt as if he had

returned to a solid world when he gripped the iron hoop
tightly bolted to the mast. True, the whole basket made
dizzy circles in the sky, but it was firm ground compared
with the rope ladder.

He looked down at the disappointed master, now almost

completely hidden from view by the sails. Captain Grindle
shook his fist as if Roger had deliberately offended him by
arriving safely in the rings.

‘Remember,’ yelled the captain, ‘you’ll sight first, or stay

there till you do.’

Of course, that was not fair. Sighting the spout of & whale is
not easy. Experience helps, and Jiggs had had experience,
plenty of it.

The beginner is apt to think he sees the spout of a whale

when it is only the spume of a breaking wave. Later he gets
to know the difference. The spray from a wave-crest is
irregular and quickly loses its force. The spout of a whale is
like the^spurt of water from a high-pressure hose.

And yet it doesn’t quite look like water, because it isn’t

water. Whalers of the nineteenth century supposed it to be
water. They supposed the whale to be spitting out water it
had taken in by mouth while under the sea.

Now we know that the column of white is steam, not water.

The giant of the deeps is letting off steam. The air that he
has held in his lungs during his half-hour or more beneath
the sea is forcibly expelled. Having been retained so long
within the warm body of the whale the air is at the blood
temperature of whales and humans, about 98-6 degrees
Fahrenheit. It is full of moisture because it has been inside a
moist body.

When the whale blows out the warm wet air it condenses to
form a mist, just as a man’s breath does when exhaled on a
frosty morning. So a whale’s spout is just a magnificent
column of mist rising twenty, thirty, forty feet high. From the
rings or crow’s-nest of a whaler it can be seen as far as seven
miles away.

The spout comes from the whalers nose, located on top of

his head. Roger, clutching the rail and looking out to sea,
tried to remember some things Mr Scott had told him about
whales. Mr Scott had for many years made a scientific study
of whales and their habits.

‘If you ever have to watch for whales,’ he said to Roger,

‘keep your eye out for a white palm tree. That’s what it looks
like, the whale’s spout. It goes up in a column and then
branches out at the top. And it isn’t straight up and down. It
leans a little. When you see the spout you can tell which
way the whale is going, because the spout always leans
forward.’

‘Do all whales have the same kind of spout?’ Roger had
asked.

‘No. The palm-tree spout is made by the sperm-whale. His

nose has only one nostril, so his tree of steam has only one
trunk. If you see two trunks you are probably looking at a
rorqual. They have two nostrils and send up twin jets that
divide at the top and fall over in two branches like the
boughs of a willow. And this twin willow doesn’t lean
forward, it stands straight up.’
Chapter 4

The first whale

Roger now scanned the sea, looking for a white palm with a
single trunk, or a willow with two.

He knew he was more likely to see the palm than the willow.
The two-nostril whales were best hunted far down in the
seas of snow and ice near the South Pole. But the sperm-
whale is a tropical animal and loves the warm waters near
the Equator.

Whalers of the past hunted it there so relentlessly that it

became scarce. Now, after a half-century of rest, sperm-
whales were once more fairly plentiful in the warm seas
between Hawaii and Tahiti.

And so many new uses have been found for all the parts of
this great animal that no richer treasure can be discovered
in the sea than a big sperm-whale. So Roger felt a thrill of
importance at the thought that the winning of such a
treasure might depend upon him.

Of course, Jiggs would probably sight one first. But just now
Roger noticed that Jiggs was not looking out to sea. He was
looking at Roger. Presently he called across to the boy:

‘Cap was a bit rough on ye.’ Is he always so mean?’

‘You haven’t seen the half of it yet. My advice to you is, keep
your eyes skinned for a whale.’
For an hour, and then for another hour, Roger searched the
sea. What a hopeless task it seemed. You couldn’t look
everywhere at once. While you were staring in one direction
a whale might be spouting to high heaven behind you.

He revolved like a radar screen trying to cover the whole

circle of the sea every ten seconds. His own revolving, plus
the wheeling of his high basket, did not help that uneasy
feeling at the pit of his stomach. His eyes became tired and
blurred. When he closed them for a moment he could still
see nothing but leaping blue waves. His nerves were tight
and his arm pained badly. What was so hard for him seemed
to be easy for Jiggs. The sailor had had long practice. A
quick glance about him every few seconds was all he
needed.

He looked at the boy with sympathy, remembering his own

hard experiences as a lad on a whaling ship. He had heard
the captain’s threat - that if Roger did not sight a whale he
would stay there until he did.

They had been watching for three hours when Jiggs, in one
of his quick surveys, caught sight of a white jet rising from
the sea on the starboard bow.

He was about to sing out when he remembered Roger. The

boy did not see the spout. He was looking in exactly the
opposite direction, but he was turning and soon would be
facing towards the whale.

Jiggs still had a chance to make the first call. There was
always keen competition between Lookouts. Jiggs was not
used to letting any lookout beat him, if he could help it. But
now, sympathy for the greenhorn held his tongue.

The whale spouted again. It was barely two miles off.

Someone on deck might see it. In that case both lookouts
would be disgraced, and might even be in for a flogging.

Jiggs could have told Roger where to look. He did not,

because he had already seen enough of the boy’s courage to
know that he would refuse to sing out for a whale if he knew
that Jiggs had seen it first. No, the lad must discover it for
himself.

Roger was now facing directly forward. Now his eyes, turned
to starboard. He was looking straight towards the whale, but
that beast, hidden in the waves, chose this instant to be
contrary and was sending up no spout. Roger’s gaze turned
farther to starboard. Jiggs gave up his generous plan and
opened his mouth to call “Thar she blows’ as the whale sent
up another white palm tree.

He never did let out that call. Roger, though not looking
directly towards the whale, saw the jet from the corner of his
eye.

He had known for years that the lookout sighting a whale is

supposed to call ‘Thar she blows!’ But now he was so excited
that he could not think of the words. He jumped up and
down and yelled: ‘Whale! Whale!’

The captain came running from the afterdeck calling:

‘Where away?’

‘Over there,’ yelled Roger, forgetful that the canvas between

him and the deck would prevent the captain from seeing
where he was pointing.

‘Where, you young fool? Weather or lee?’

Roger tried to collect his wits. ‘Four points on the weather-

bow, sir. About two miles off.’
‘What kind?’

‘Sperm-whale.’

Captain Grindle came swarming up the ratlines. When a

whale is sighted the captain belongs in the rings. In an
amazingly short time Grindle made the masthead and stood
beside Roger.

He looked away, four points on the weather-bow, and saw -

nothing. He fixed an icy stare upon Roger.

‘If you got me up here on a fool’s errand -‘

Tm quite sure I saw something, sir.’

But was he sure? He had seen it only out of the corner of his
eye. When he had looked straight towards it, it was gone.
The breeze had freshened and every once in a while the
white crest of a wave would burst into spray. Perhaps this
was what he had seen.

The same thought had evidently occurred to the captain. He

gazed to starboard for a few minutes, then his patience
snapped.

‘White water, that’s what you saw. I’ll teach you to waste my
time,’ and he swung a heavy fist at the boy’s head.

Roger ducked just in time to avoid the blow, and the

captain’s fist crashed into the mast. He yelped with pain and
looked at his bleeding knuckles. Of course, he put the blame
on Roger. Muttering curses, he was about to thrash the
greenhorn when Jiggs, seeing what was likely to happen,
interrupted with a ringing shout: ‘Bl-o-o-o-o-ws!’
The captain and Roger turned to look. There was no mistake
about it this time. The boy’s report had been right The jet
was four points on the weather-bow and it was the spout of a
sperm-whale.

‘All hands on deck!’ roared the captain. The call was

repeated by the mate below: ‘All hands on deck! Back the
main yard! Stand by to lower!’
Chapter 5

Nantucket sleigh ride

At once the ship came alive. There was the sound of heavy
sea-boots on the deck as the men ran aft to the boats. The
mate kept shouting orders. Again the captain turned upon
Roger.

‘Well, what are you doing here? Get down to the boat’.’

Very willingly, Roger left the captain and scrambled down to

the deck as fast as his gammy arm would permit. Durkins,
the second mate, caught sight of him.

‘You -1 can use you in my boat. Third oar.’

The men leaped into the whaleboats. The lashings were cast
off.

‘Lower away!’

The falls raced through the sheaves. Down went the boats.
The men bent to the oars. Three light cedar whaleboats, six
men in each, streaked away towards the spouting whale.

‘All right, boys,’ shouted the mate, ‘give way now and spring
to it. Put some beef in it.’

Roger felt the mate’s eye on him. He could guess what

the mate was thinking. This greenhorn would probably catch

a crab - get his oar fouled with the others.
Durkins relaxed when he saw that Roger knew how to handle
an oar. The kid kept his eye on the stroke-oar and timed his
own stroke with it. What the mate could not guess was how
painful this was for Roger with the right arm singing from
the blow of the belaying-pin.

The mate stood at the steering-sweep. He could not see the

whale, and even the spout was hidden by intervening
waves. Yet he knew where to steer. He kept glancing at the
ship, which had turned its prow towards the whale.

He knew, too, when the whale was on the surface and when
it dived. This information was signalled to him by the
captain at the masthead. When the whale broke water the
captain ran up a flag; when it ‘went flukes’, plunged
beneath the surface, the flag was lowered.

Roger saw his brother in one of the other boats. Hal was
pulling lustily. His boat was edging ahead. But Durkins was
not to be easily beaten.

‘Pull, boys. Pull like steers. Pull. Pile it on. Long and strong.
Pull - every son of you. What’s the matter, kid?’

This last remark was addressed to Roger, who was in such

pain that he could no longer pull the fourteen-foot ash oar.

‘My arm,’ said Roger.

‘And I don’t wonder,’ said Durkins, ‘after the rap that pig
gave you. Ship your oar.’

Roger took in his oar. He felt like a deserter. With only four
oars working the boat steadily lost ground. Both the other
boats passed it. Durkins still urged his men on, but it was
hopeless. Roger knew how disappointed the second mate
must be. Then his eye lit on the mast, which lay across the
thwarts. ‘I could put up the sail,’ he suggested. ‘No good,’
said the mate. ‘We’re too close to the wind.’ Roger knew
nothing about whaling, but a good deal about sailing. He did
not want to argue with the mate. Testing the wind on his
face, he felt that the sail would draw enough air to be worth
while. They might even be able to overtake the other boats.
‘Please, sir, may I try it?’ he ventured. The mate hesitated.
‘Guess it will do no harm,’ he said, and added rather bitterly:
‘You’re no good to us, anyway. You may as well be doing that
as sitting there like a lump on a log.’

Roger lost no time in stepping the mast. Lifting it, he placed

it erect in the hole in the forward thwart. The boom dropped.
The triangular sail opened and hung like a tired dishcloth.
The men muttered in disgust.

Roger hauled in on the sheet-rope. The sail suddenly filled

with air and began to pull.

Roger handled the sheet like the rein of a racehorse,

drawing a little, giving a little, to suit every changing whim
of the breeze. The boat gained speed. Presently it was racing
away like a scared cat. It was rapidly overhauling the other
boats. ‘The kid’s got something,’ said Durkins. The whale
was now in plain sight. Its great black hulk blocked the sky.
To Roger it looked as big as the ship. This little twenty-foot
boat was only as long as the monster’s lower jaw.

He realized fully for the first time the risk men take who go
out in such an eggshell to attack the greatest living creature
on the face of the earth. Excitement raced up and down his
spine. He had to confess to himself that he was scared. He
almost hoped that one of the other boats would get there
first.
And that was what happened. The boat in which Hal was
pulling shot up alongside the whale a split second before the
mate’s. The harpooner standing in the bow hurled his iron.
In his hurry to be first he threw at too great a distance and
the harpoon fell into the water.

At the same instant the mate’s boat, propelled by both oars

and sail, slid into position beside the whale just behind its
enormous head. The harpooner was Jim son. Dropping his
oar he leaped to his feet in the boat’s bow, raised his
harpoon, and plunged it into the black hide.

The monster hardly felt it, for the iron ‘boned’ - that is,
instead of penetrating deep into the flesh, it struck a bone,
and with such force that the iron was bent. Then it dropped
away into the sea.

At once Jimson snatched up his second iron and threw it with

all his might. It sank in up to the hitches.

A tremor like an earthquake ran through the giant body.

‘Stern all!’ yelled the mate, and the men lost no time in
rowing the boat backward out of reach of the whale’s flukes.
At the same time the enormous two-fluked tail, bigger than
the screw of any vessel afloat, rose thirty feet into the air
and came down again upon the water with a resounding
crash not six inches from the gunwale of the boat. The wave
made by this gigantic blow washed into the boat and half
filled it.

Away went the sea giant, towing the boat behind it. The line
from the harpoon to the boat was as taut as a tightrope. The
boat was flying through the spray at a good twenty knots.
Wave-tops kept tumbling in. The men shipped their oars and
bailed for their lives.
A picture of the whole exciting operation was being taken by
Mr Scott in the third boat. But it was only a few moments
before the whale and the towed boat had disappeared
behind the blue waves, tearing across the sea on what
whalers choose to call the ‘Nantucket sleigh ride’. Roger
wondered if it was the last picture that would ever be taken
of him. If they couldn’t get the water out of the boat faster
than it came in, they would all very soon be on their way
down to visit Davy Jones.
Chapter 6

Man overboard
Suddenly the whale changed direction. The boat was yanked
round to the right so forcibly that a man who had stood up
to bail a bucket of water into the sea went over the side.

Roger was amazed that no one did anything about it.

‘Man overboard!’ he yelled.

Surely they would cut the tow-line, turn the boat about and
go back to the rescue. But the mate gave no such order. He
stood, gripping the steering-oar, gazing straight ahead at
the speeding whale. The other men were equally silent. They
kept on scooping out the water. The mate noticed that Roger
had stopped work and was staring at him in astonishment.

‘Bail, boy, bail!’

‘But the man -‘

‘One of the other boats may pick him up. If not, it’s his bad
luck.’ Seeing the shocked look on Roger’s face the mate
went on: ‘You’ll soon learn, boy. Whaling is serious business.
That big bull has a hundred barrels of oil in him. What d’ye
think the captain would say if we let him go just to pick a
man out of the water?’

Roger went back to bailing. He felt he was in a world of a

hundred years ago. The whaling ship Killer stuck to the old
traditions. Human life was cheap. What mattered was barrels
of oil. Today, men who work are protected by many safety
devices. In the old days a man must look out for himself and
devil take him if he didn’t look sharp. Today, we are quite
careful not to kill one man at a time - we only plan to kill a
hundred thousand or a million at one blow with a hydrogen
bomb. Roger gave up trying to figure which were more cruel,
the old days or the new.

Suddenly the line slackened. The whale had again changed

direction. It was now coming straight for the boat.

It had not been able to get rid of its enemy by running away.
Now it was going to attack.

It opened its enormous jaws, revealing a cavern big enough

to take boat and all. It was like looking through the door into
a room twenty feet long and twelve feet wide.

But it was not a comfortable-looking room. The floor was

paved with sharp teeth a foot long and weighing as much as
four pounds each. The upper jaw had no teeth, but a row of
sockets into which the teeth of the lower jaw would fit when
the mouth was closed. It would be too bad for the man or the
boat that happened to get ground into one of those sockets
like meal in a mortar.

Roger had learned enough about whales to know that the

sperm is a man-eater and boat-eater. It is quite different
from the toothless baleen, or whalebone-whale, that has
nothing in its mouth but a big sieve to catch the creatures of
the sea that are its food. Such a whale couldn’t swallow a
man, and wouldn’t want to. It could take a thousand crayfish
but wouldn’t know what to do with a shark.

But the big sperm has no use for the little titbits that can be
found on the surface of the sea. His favourite food is the
enormous cuttlefish sometimes fifty feet long and equipped
with a great savage beak that may kill the whale or wound it
so badly that it will carry the scars for the rest of its life.

Such a whale can swallow a man as easily as a man may

swallow a pill. Many times whalers have found a shark
twelve feet long or longer in the stomach of a sperm-whale.

‘Lay to the oars!’ yelled the mate.

The men left bailing to row. The boat had not yet lost the
momentum of its swift flight over the sea. This, helped by
the rowing, carried it forward fast enough, so that when the
whale arrived the boat was no longer there. It barely missed
the jaws, which closed on the steering-oar, crunching it to
bits.

Away went the whale, only to turn and come back again
towards the boat. This time it dived, as if planning to come
up beneath the boat and toss it into the air.

‘Hang on!’ shouted the mate.

The men clutched the gunwales and waited for the shock.

Now all could look forward to being dumped into the sea.
Blood from the wound made by the harpoon had stained the
water and attracted sharks. Roger suddenly realized that the
man who had fallen overboard back there where there were
no sharks and no angry whale was the lucky one after all.

The blow from beneath did not come. Instead, the line began
to sing out of the tub in which it was coiled. ‘He sounds!’
said Durkins.

Roger heard no sound. Then he realized what Durkins had

meant. When a whale ‘sounds’, it means that he dives deep.
A strange word, when you come to think of it. A sounding
whale makes no sound. On the surface he may have been
blowing and splashing and champing his great jaws, and
even groaning with pain, but when he dives you hear
nothing. Nothing but the whirr of the line out of the tub as
the great beast carries the harpoon deeper and deeper.

‘Look out for that line!’ commanded the mate. The flying line
lashed about like an angry snake. If an arm or leg got caught
in it the limb would be nipped off as neatly as if amputated
by a surgeon’s saw. Either that, or the man would be
snatched out of the boat by the whizzing line and carried
down after the whale.

How deep would the whale go? The sperm-whale is the best
diver on earth. With the greatest of ease he can go a quarter
of a mile or more straight down.

A man would be crushed to a pulp long before he could

reach such a depth. The pressure of the water upon his body
would squeeze all the flesh out from between his bones and
crush his skull. Even if he could descend to such a depth he
could not rise again to the surface without getting a terrific
case of the “bends’ that would cost him his life.

The line was nearly all gone from the tub. But there was a
second tub of line, and a sailor hastily tied the two ends
together. In a few seconds the first tub was empty, and the
line was whirring out of the second so fast that the eye could
not follow it. ‘He can’t go much deeper,’ said one of the men.

‘Can’t he, though?’ retorted the mate. ‘Ever hear what

happened down near Panama? A submarine cable broke and
a repair-ship was sent out to fix it. When the ship hauled the
two broken ends to the surface a dead sperm-whale was
found in the coils. That cable had been lying on the bottom
of the sea, and the sea at that point is half a mile deep. To
get caught in the cable, the whale had to dive half a mile
straight down.’

‘We can’t afford to have this one dive so deep.’ said the man
who had spoken before. ‘We have only three hundred
fathoms of line.’

‘Better start snubbing,’ said the mate.

A sailor threw two loops of the line around a loggerhead, or

post. The line still ran, but it was slowed by friction against
the post and this increased the drag on the whale. The
monster might even be discouraged from his downward
dive.

This snubbing could be dangerous. If the line was too tight

round the post the whale might drag boat and all beneath
the sea. The bow was already much lower and the gunwales
were awash. Men bailed lustily as waves broke into the boat.

There was still another danger - fire. The friction of the line
against the loggerhead sent up a curl of blue smoke and
presently a yellow flame sputtered.

‘Douse it!’ ordered the mate.

The man nearest the loggerhead emptied his leather bailing-

bucket over the flame. It disappeared, and so did the smoke.
But it was only a few moments before the heat of the
passing line started a new blaze. Again and again the
loggerhead had to be baptized with sea-water.
Chapter 7

A quarter of a mile down

The line went slack.

The big bull had ended his dive. Perhaps he thought he had
gone deep enough to be safe, perhaps he had been slowed
down by the pull of the line. He lay there more than a
quarter of a mile deep while five men in a boa-! anxiously
waited.

‘How long can they stay down?’ Roger asked.

Roger remembered his own underwater experiences. When

diving in the pearl lagoon he had been able to hold his
breath for three minutes. No human diver could do much
better than that.

‘No telling,’ said the mate. ‘Usually fifteen to forty minutes.

But they’ve been known to stay below for an hour and a
half.’

‘How can they do without air for so long?’

‘You saw all that spouting,’ replied the mate. ‘Every time he
spouted he blew out dead air and took in fresh air. He did
that about a dozen times. That wasn’t just to fill his lungs - it
was to put oxygen into his blood. That’s where it counts. And
a whale can do about five times as good a job of
oxygenating its blood as a man can do. No other breathing
animal can do as well. A living submarine, that’s what a
whale is.’
The other whaleboats had come up, ready to help if they
were needed. The man who had tumbled overboard had
been rescued and now climbed back into the mate’s boat.

He was soaking wet and worn out, but he got no sympathy

from the crew. Whalers had no kind words for a man who was
too clumsy to keep his balance in a boat.

He shivered with cold. Roger stripped off his sweater and

gave it to him. The men laughed at him for taking clothes
from a boy. Angrily, he gave the sweater back to Roger. He
would rather shiver than be laughed at.

For more than three-quarters of an hour they waited. The

men sat idly in the bobbing boats. One would think they
would be glad of the rest. But every moment was full of
suspense.

No one could say where the monster would come up. He

might rise beneath the boats, tossing them high into the air
and spilling their occupants into the shark-infested waters.

‘The longer he stays down the faster he’ll come up,’ said the
mate. ‘He’ll be crazy for fresh air.’

The sea began to boil. It was as if a great fire had been lit
under it. It rose in a huge bubbling hump, and up through
this hill of water shot the whale as if he had been fired from
a gun.

He rose clear out of the water and seemed to be standing on

his tail like a black tower eighty feet high - about the height
of a seven-storey building. Imagine seeing a skyscraper
suddenly appear on the open sea. It was a spectacle to
remember, and Scott operating his cine-camera was making
sure that it would be remembered.
Down came the skyscraper, sending out waves that dashed
the boats into each other and made the men bail furiously.
The whale threw up one white palm tree after another as he
breathed out stale air and took in fresh. It would take him
many minutes to restore oxygen to his blood, and during
that time he would think of nothing else. This was the
whalers’ chance.

‘Lay to it, boys,’ shouted the mate. ‘Pull! Come in just behind
his left eye.’

He left the stern and stepped over the thwarts to the bow,
while the harpooner came back and took his place in the
stern.

It was the old custom. The officer must have the honour of
killing the whale. Durkins took up the lance. It was an iron
spear five feet long and as sharp as a razor. It was quite
unlike the harpoon. The harpoon was. made to go in and
hang on, like a fish-hook. The lance was made to go much
farther in, and kill.

The mate stood in the bow, the lance held high in his right
hand.

‘Closer.’ he ordered.

Roger would have been willing not to get any closer to-the
great black boat-slasher. His heart was in his mouth. The
enormous hulk of the whale loomed above the small boat
and shut off half the sky. The fountains of steam blasted off
into the sky like the exhaust of a jet plane.

Now the bow actually touched the black hide. The mate
leaned forward and plunged the lance in just behind the
eye.
‘Back her, back her!’ he yelled.

The boat pulled away. The whole body of the whale was
trembling and twisting. A deep groan came from the

monster, reminding those who listened that this was no fish,

but a mammal like the man who was killing him. The groan
began on a low tone, but rose to a high wailing bellow.

Then again he spouted. This time the palm tree was not
white, but red with blood. This the whalemen called
‘flowering’. And it did look like a gigantic flower, thirty feet
high. It was evident that the lance had pierced the lungs.
Roger shrank as the rain of blood fell on the boats, but the
men were cheering.

‘A hundred barrels if he’s a pint!’ exulted Jimson.

The whale was dead. The sea was blood-red and the sharks
were already tearing at the carcass.

A line was put over the tail and the three boats joined forces
in hauling the prize back to the ship.

It was a long, slow job. Fifteen oars dipped and pulled. Each
pull won only an inch or two. The captain could have
brought the ship closer, but he seemed to take a perverse
delight in seeing the oarsmen sweat it out. It was long after
dark before the whale was alongside the ship. There the
cable round the tail was passed aboard and secured. It was
as if two ships lay side by side.

The boats were hoisted to the davits and the men collapsed
on deck, quite exhausted. The cook brought them meat and
coffee. Roger said to Jimson:

‘Boy, won’t that bunk feel good!’

Chapter 8

The wolves of the sea

There was great turmoil in the water around the dead whale.
The sea was alive with sharks rushing frantically about,
taking bites out of the carcass and out of each other.

That won’t do,’ growled the captain. ‘By morning we won’t

have any whale left. Somebody’s got to get down there and
fend off those sharks. Who volunteers?’

No one volunteered. Even if they had been fresh none of

them would have chosen to spend the night on that slippery
carcass fighting off the wolves of the sea.

Captain Grindle walked about among his weary sailors.

His eye lit on Roger. The captain’s fist was still sore from the
whack against the mast when Roger had dodged his blow.

‘You - you young squirt!’ snapped Grindle. ‘Get down on that

whale.’

Hal spoke up. ‘Let me go.’ Mr Scott also ventured a protest.

The mate said:

‘The kid’s pretty well whacked, Captain. He pulled a good

oar. He deserves to rest.’

‘Who gives orders on this ship?’ roared the skipper. ‘Did ever
a ship have such a pack of softies! The next man who talks
back at me will be put in irons.’
He gave Roger a hard kick in the ribs.

‘Get down there, you lazy loafer. This ought to be good - a

gent dancing on a whale’s back. You may find the dance-
floor a bit slippery. One good thing about it -if we lose you,
we won’t lose much. I can’t spare a real man. Get along!’

He kicked again, but since Roger had already moved away

the captain lost his footing and sat down hard on the deck.
Some of the men laughed. That did not improve the
captain’s-temper. Hurling curses about him like belaying-
pins, he strode off to his quarters aft.

Roger stood at the rail looking down on the dead monster

besieged by sharks. An almost full moon lit the weird scene.
The mate was looping a rope around Roger beneath the
arms. The other end of the rope would be held by a seaman
on deck.

‘If you slip, he’ll pull you up,’ said the mate.

The seaman, whose name was Brad, did not willingly accept
the job.

‘Look here,’ he complained. ‘This ain’t my watch. I’m tired.

I’ve done my bit.’

‘So has everybody else,’ replied the mate. ‘You know well
enough there aren’t any watches when we catch a whale.’

‘But suppose I fall asleep?’

‘Don’t,’ warned the mate.

He gave Roger a whaling-spade. This was a flat razor-edged

knife about the same shape as a spade fastened to the end
of a fifteen-foot pole. Tomorrow, spades like this would be
used to cut the blubber from the whale. Tonight, the spade
would be Roger’s only weapon against the sharks.

Try to punch them in the nose,’ the mate instructed. ‘That’s

where they kill easiest. Or rip them in the belly when they
turn over.’

Roger, trembling with weariness, but stimulated to new

strength by this new challenge, climbed over the rail. Brad
eased out the line and Roger was lowered to the whale’s
back.

Roger’s first act was to fall flat on his face. The captain had
not been fooling. The whale’s back was slippery. It was more
slippery than any dance-floor.

The whale’s skin is not wrinkled like an elephant’s or rhino’s.

It is not hair like the hide of a buffalo or lion. It has no scales
like those of a fish. It is as smooth as glass.

Worse than that, it is like greased glass. Oil from the blubber
beneath it oozes up through it, filling the pores so as to keep
out the cold and enable the monster to slide through the
water like a streamlined submarine. Roger heard a low
chuckle from the sailor Brad, watching him from the deck
above. He crawled to his feet, clutching the spade. The
ocean swell rolled the whale gently from side to side. At
each roll Roger slid, and Brad chuckled.

If Roger slipped down on the off-side he would be promptly

finished off by sharks. If he slid down on the other side he
would be crushed between the ship and the whale. The
danger terrified Roger, but the man above him couldn’t care
less.

Brad resented being posted on this dreary night duty. He

was already tired of holding the rope-end. Glancing round to
make sure that no officer was looking, he made fast the end
of the line to a stay. Then he settled himself to enjoy the
acrobatics of the moonlit figure on the rolling dance-floor.

Roger was not going to give him much amusement. The boy
was learning how to keep his footing. With his sharp spade
he cut two footholds in which he could sink his heels. Now
he swayed with the roll, but did not slip. With his feet firmly
planted, and the rope to hang on to, he could stay upright.

Brad was disappointed. It had promised to be a good show,

but the boy had spoiled it. Disgusted, Brad slumped down to
the deck and went to sleep. , The jar made by a big wave
sent Roger sliding and he got back to his footholds with
difficulty.

‘Hi,’ he called. ‘Will you hold that line a little tighter?’

He got no answer. He called again, without effect. He saw

that the line had been looped to a stay. He supposed that
Brad had sneaked off to his bunk.

The silence terrified Roger. The silent sky above with stars
racing back and forth as the whale rolled, the silent ship, the
silent sea hiding mystery and death.

Only the dorsal fin of each shark could’ be seen. It stood up

like a little black sail in the path of the moon. There were at
least a dozen of these small black sails speeding here and
there, now rushing in to the whale’s flank, now sailing away
again as the shark swam off with a chunk of meat in its teeth
to swallow at leisure.

As one sail approached, Roger plunged in bis spade and felt

it go deep into the living ship beneath that sail. At once
blood poured from the injured shark while its tail savagely
thrashed the water in an effort to escape. But the other
sharks were upon it at once and, like the cannibals they
were, proceeded to tear their companion to bits and devour
him.

When they had done dining upon their brother they turned
their attention once more to the whale. Another sail came
flying in, but disappeared at the last moment as the shark
turned upside-down before taking its bite. Some sharks
prefer this upside-down way of attack. Roger’s cutting spade
plunged into the brute’s throat. Again the sharks forgot the
whale to turn upon their injured companion.

Why did they prefer to eat each other? It was because they
were blood-lovers. Blood is to sharks what alcohol is to men.
They go wild over it, drunk even at the smell of it. And it is
much easier to get through the skin to the blood of a shark
than to penetrate a whale’s coat of blubber a foot thick and
reach its arteries and heart.

If Roger could just keep these cannibals feeding upon each

other he could save the whale. He tried every time to strike
the sensitive nose. Often this was impossible and he sliced
into the shark as it was swimming away. When the cut was
far back towards the tail where the shark could reach it by
turning its head back and tail forward, this strange devil of
the sea would actually tear at the wound with its teeth,
drink its own blood and devour its own flesh.

The red sea attracted more and more sharks. Many of them
attacked out of reach of Roger’s fifteen-foot spade. He must
be able to run forward towards the whale’s head, or back
towards its tail. Two footholds were not enough - he had to
cut a row of them, both forward and aft, each hole cupped
two or three inches deep into the hide. Along this curious
path on a whale’s back Roger ran this way and that as far as
the length of his rope would permit, and stabbed every
attacker he could reach.

Once as the whale rolled he slipped out of the tracks and

slid far over until his feet were in the sea. With a rush the
savage beasts closed in on him, snapping at his boots.
Fortunately they were tough and strong, and not easily
crushed.

Then one boot was yanked off together with the woollen

sock beneath it.

Roger felt teeth closing upon his bare leg. He jerked it out of
the way and hauled himself up on to the whale by means of
the rope.

Blood streamed from his leg. Should he climb on deck and

have it attended to? There was no surgeon on board. It was
usual for the captain to have some skill in first aid. But
Roger would rather suffer the pain and risk of blood-
poisoning than submit himself to the tender mercies of
Captain Grindle.

He scrubbed the wound with sea-water, tied his

handkerchief round the leg, and went on with his work.

Midnight came and went. Roger had trouble in keeping his

eyes open. A ghostly haze lay over the sea. It was the time
of night for men to sleep and ghosts to walk. Roger was not
superstitious, but he could not help but be affected by the
mystery of the night.

And then he saw something that sent a chill of fear down his
spine. It could not he true. He must have gone to sleep and
he was having a terrible nightmare.
For the dorsal fins that cut the water, each of them about a
foot high, had suddenly grown into great black sails as tall
as a man. Taller - they were certainly seven or eight feet
high.

No more did they skim along gently like sail-boats. They

shot by at furious speed. They ploughed up the water and
sent spray high into the air.

One of them came straight towards the whale. It struck the

great eighty-foot monster with such force that Roger felt the
vibration throughout the huge body. No shark, not even the
great white shark, could strike such a blow.
Chapter 9

Fighting killer-whales
Then one of these impossible monsters raised its head six
feet above the surface of the sea. It looked like a great black
torpedo standing on end. It was as big as a dozen sharks.
Evidently supported by the moving tail and fins beneath, it
continued to stand up like a statue for many seconds. And it
looked straight at Roger.

The moon in its westward journey was now in position to

light the beast’s eyes, Roger had never seen such eyes. They
were not small like those of a whale. They were as big as
saucers, and round and staring. Roger felt as small as a
midget under that terrible gaze.

And he realized that he was not dreaming. He was looking at

a killer-whale

The killer-whale is the most dangerous creature of the sea.

Curiously enough it is not really a whale. It is the largest of
the porpoise family. But sailors of the early days gave it the
name killer-whale, and the name has stuck.

A famous scientist has called it ‘the most terrible flesh-

eating creature on our planet’. A full-grown killer-whale is
about thirty feet long. It is shaped like a torpedo and can
flash through the water at a speed of thirty-six miles per
hour. It has a dozen huge sharp teeth in the lower jaw and
another dozen in the upper. The teeth are curved inward,
and whatever they take hold of has very little chance of
escape.
The big eyes have keen vision and behind them is an
intelligent brain. In fact, the brain of the killer-whale is said
to be better than that of the chimpanzee, better than that of
any other living thing except man.

But unhappily that wonderful brain has only one ambition -

to kill. It is the brain of a devil. No wonder the Eskimos who
believe in evil spirits call this beast a wicked god that can
take on the form of a killer-whale in the water or a wolf on
land.

Killers are clever. When they see walruses or seals lying on a

floating cake of ice, they will come up under the floe and
break it to bits so that the animals will fall into the water.
They will go after men in the same deadly fashion. Cherry
Garrard in The Worst Journey in the World tells of what
happened on an Antarctic expedition when a man and two
dogs on an ice-floe were attacked by seven killer-whales:
‘The next moment the whole floe under him and the dogs
heaved up and split into fragments. One could hear the
booming noise as the whales rose under the ice and struck it
with their backs. Whale after whale rose under the ice
setting it rocking fearfully. Luckily Ponting kept his feet and
was able to fly to security. By an extraordinary chance also,
the splits had been made around and between the dogs so
that neither of them fell into the water. Then it was clear
that the whales shared our astonishment, for one after
another, their huge hideous heads shot vertically into the air
through the cracks which they had made. As they reared
them to a height of six or eight feet it was possible to see
their tawny head markings, their glistening eyes and the
terrible array of teeth, the most terrifying in the world. But
the fact that they could display such deliberate cunning,
that they were able to break ice of such thickness, at least
two feet, and that they could act in unison, was a revelation
to us.’
Sometimes instead of coming up under the ice a killer will
slide up on top of it, clear of the water, grab its prey, then
wriggle off into the sea. In the same way it may come aboard
a raft, a whaleboat, or a small ship.

Recently a tuna-boat off the California coast was visited by a

killer. It circled round and round the boat until the ship’s
cook got annoyed and potted the beast with a rifle bullet.

Instead of killing it or scaring it away, the bullet only made

the killer furiously angry. He swam straight for the ship, shot
up into the air, and crashed head-on into the galley, the
great jaws chopping the cookhouse into kindling. Luckily the
cook saved himself by diving head-first into the hold.

The killer thrashed savagely about, breaking all the dishes

and crunching the iron pans and buckets until they looked
as if a tractor had run over them. He chewed up the galley
stove, fire and all, but when a huge pot containing enough
soup for twenty men spilled its boiling contents on his nose
he flipped back into the sea and swam off:’

The cook crawled up, green and shaking, from the hold and
looked at the ruins of his galley. The crew ate cold salt pork
that day. The cook never again fired a bullet at a killer-
whale.

One after another the killers sat up in the sea and looked at
Roger. He knew they could easily slide up on the whale’s
back. Then - one crunch - and Hal would have no brother.

Perhaps he had better swarm up to the safety of the deck

while there was still a chance. But if he ran away the killers
would devour the whale. Already they were making savage
lunges at the body and swimming off with great chunks of
flesh. Several of them were attacking the head. Roger
remembered hearing, on his Pacific voyages, of the killer’s
habit of forcing the whale’s mouth open to get at its tongue.

Nothing tasted so good to a killer as a whale’s tongue. It was

soft and spongy and full of delicious oil. In fact, the oil in it
made it not only luscious to the killer but valuable to the
whaler.

The tongue of a sperm-whale is as big as a full-grown

elephant. It contains at least fifteen barrels of the finest oil.
If Roger allowed these thieves to get away with the tongue
he hated to think what would happen to him at the hands of
Captain Grindle.

The great carcass quivered and shook as the savages

knocked their noses against the lips in an effort to open the
mouth and get at the tongue. Whatever Roger was going to
do he would have to do quickly. His rope was not long
enough to allow him to get to the whale’s head. With more
courage than common sense he threw off the rope and
started forward. He cut holes for his feet Even with the help
of these footholds he had trouble in keeping his balance.
The big whale rolled with the waves and trembled under the
attack of the killers.

Roger was now on the whale’s head. The head of a sperm-

whale is an enormous box some ten feet high.

The nose is on top of it and the mouth is under it. So Roger

stood many feet above the killers as they battered against
the whale’s lips. Fortunately they were too busy trying to
break into this big food-box to pay much attention to the
small morsel of boy above them. So long as he left them
alone they might leave him alone.

He could not afford to let them alone. But what could he do

with a spade when even a rifle bullet would have no effect
upon such a beast?

He believed that the spade could do what the bullet could

not. The spade would let out blood. If these monsters had as
bad table manners as the sharks, they would attack their
bloody brother. He hoped it would work. There was nothing
else he could do.

With all his strength he drove the sharp spade down into the
head of the nearest killer. The tremendous thrashing that
resulted scared him out of his-wits. The animal he had
wounded backed off, raised his head man-high out of the
sea, and stared full at Roger. Then he submerged and came
in with a rush. Close to the whale he shot up out of the water
and on to the big head.

Roger had not waited for him. He had lost no time in running
aft. The killer’s jaws clamped upon emptiness.

With one wrench of its body the angry beast twisted its head
close to the boy. Blood spurting from the wound sprayed
upon Roger. He hunted for the rope by which he could pull
himself up to the deck. Dawn was now greying the sky and
in its light he could see that the precious rope had swung
out of reach against the side of the ship.

He shouted for help. Brad woke, rose and looked sleepily

over the rail. He could not believe what he saw. His mouth
hung open stupidly as he tried to clear the mist of sleep
from his brain.

‘Throw me a line!’ yelled Roger. The big killer was squirming

like a fish out of water, trying to get near enough to close its
jaws upon its enemy. Then a line came whistling over
Roger’s shoulder. It was not the stupid Brad who had thrown
it, but the second mate, Durkins. ‘Latch on to it, boy!’
Roger immediately gripped the line and had his arms almost
pulled out of their sockets, so powerful was the pull of the
mate’s strong arms as he hauled in on the line. Roger’s
swinging body crashed into the ship’s side, but how good
that felt in comparison with the crunch of the killer’s teeth!
A moment later he was spilled on deck. He got unsteadily to
his feet. ‘Are you all right, boy?’

T’m all right,’ said Roger, but he was still dizzy from the
nerve-racking experience of the last few moments. ‘The
killers are after the tongue,’ he said.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ said the mate. ‘You fixed it so they
won’t get it. Good job, kid.’

Roger was not so sure that he had fixed it. Five killers were
still struggling to get their heads into the whale’s mouth. In
the meantime the wounded killer twisted himself off the
whale’s back and fell heavily into the sea. The blood spread
out over the waves. It attracted his companions. They
rushed in upon the wounded animal, churning the sea,
gulping the blood, taking great bites out of the flukes, the
fins, the lips. They would not stop until there was nothing
left but the skeleton.

‘It will keep them out of mischief for an hour,’ said the mate
with satisfaction. ‘That will give us time to get the stage out’
He turned towards the fo’c’sle and bawled: ‘All hands on
deck!’

The men came tumbling up. With them was Hal, who had
spent a sleepless night worrying about his young brother.
Scott came from his cabin aft. Both of them would have
been glad to spend the night helping the boy, but their
interference would only have got him as well as themselves
into trouble. Now they were eager to hear about his
experiences. They talked, over the brief breakfast of coffee
and hardtack.

Their conversation was cut short by the appearance of

Captain Grindle.

‘Everybody loafing as usual,’ he snarled. ‘And a whale

waiting to be cut in.’

He fixed his eye on Roger.

T thought I posted you on the carcass. Who told you to come

up?’

T hauled him up, sir,’ said the mate.

‘Well, get him down again.’

Durkins ventured to object. ‘It isn’t necessary, sir. He sliced a

killer. That will keep the other killers busy. As for the sharks,
the killers scared them away.’

The captain peered over the rail at the surge of savage

beasts enjoying their blood breakfast.

‘Then what are you waiting for?’ shouted the captain. ‘Get
out the cutting-stage. Hop to it!’

He had forgotten about Roger. Durkins spoke in the boy’s

ear.

‘Get to your bunk. Quick, before he spots you.’

Roger slipped forward and down into the fo’c’sle. The boards
of his bunk felt like feathers. He promptly lost himself in
beautiful, delicious, heavenly sleep.
Chapter 10

Cat-o’-nine-tails
Captain Grindle turned upon Hal.

‘Well, if it ain’t the Gent!’ he sneered. ‘Your softie brother got

his. Pretty soon I’ll be getting around to you.’

‘I hope you do,’ Hal answered. That would be better than

taking it out on the boy.’

Grindle glared. ‘Do you question my authority?’

‘I question your intelligence.’ Hal knew he was unwise to say

it but he was too angry to guard his tongue.

Grindle’s always prominent eyes now seemed to stand

straight out from his head. He could not believe what he had
heard. He pushed his face close to Hal’s and said in a low,
rasping voice:

‘Do I understand you proper? You say that I don’t know how
to handle my crew?’

‘Of course you don’t,’ Hal replied. He knew that he had

waded in too far. He would have been glad to wade out
again, but it was too late. He might as well go deeper. ‘A
man who would do what you did last night to that boy is not
fit to give orders to anyone.’

The captain started back as if he had been struck. He

stood like a man turned to stone. Then he came to life and
bawled: ‘Mr Durkins!’ in a voice that made everybody jump.

The mate came running.

‘String this fellow up,’ ordered the captain. ‘Strip him to the
waist. We’ll put a pattern on his back that will stay there if
he lives to be a hundred.’

The order took the mate by surprise, but he did not dare
object.

‘Aye aye, sir,’ he answered, ‘right now, if you say so. But
perhaps you’ll be wanting us to get in the blubber first
before the killers make off with it.’

Grindle looked over the rail. The cannibals were still

breakfasting on their companion, but soon they would be
done with him and free to attack the big whale.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Business first, then pleasure. And what

a party we’ll have when the work is done! Something to look
forward to, eh, Gent?’ He turned and strode aft.

The mate scowled at Hal.

‘Now you’ve done it. Why in the devil’s name couldn’t you
keep your mouth shut? Don’t expect me to get you out of
this.’

‘I won’t,’ Hal said. T got myself into it.’

He could not be sorry. The captain’s brutality towards Roger

was enough to make anyone rebel. And yet perhaps he had
only made things worse for Roger by speaking up. As for
himself, he could already feel the cut of the cat-o’-nine-tails
into his flesh.
The cutting-stage was now lowered. This was a sort of
platform that was lashed to the rail of the ship when not in
use. When let down it projected about ten feet from the ship
like a balcony. Directly under it was the whale.

The cutters went out on the stage. Each was armed with one
of the long-handled spades. With these sharp tools they cut
a foot deep into the whale’s hide, making a lengthwise slit
Then one man descended to the whale’s back and fixed a
large ‘blubber-hook’ in the hide. A line ran from the blubber-
hook up over a block in the rigging and down to the
windlass.

The man who had fixed the hook clambered back to safety
and the mate shouted: ‘Haul! \ ||&

Then men heaved on the windlass. The rope tightened. The

strong pull of .the hook lifted the whale an inch or two
higher in the water. It had a greater effect upon the ship.
The weight of the monster made the vessel lean farther and
farther to starboard until it was hard to keep a footing on the
slippery deck.

Then there was a tearing sound and the hook went up

carrying a great strip of hide with it. As the whale rolled the
hide peeled like the skin of an orange. Whalers called this
the blanket. It was a good name. This hide, a foot thick,
consisting mainly of oily blubber, wrapped the whale as in a
blanket and kept it snug and warm when it sank into the
chill depths of the sea.

The piece of blanket was hauled inboard and dropped on the

deck. The process was repeated and, piece by piece, the
entire blanket of the whale was brought aboard.

The hardest job came next. The head must be cut off. The
spades attacked the neck, cutting deeper and deeper
through muscle and nerve and flesh. Every once in a while
the blades, dulled by bones, had to be resharpened. They
must be so sharp that they would slice through the bones
and even through the backbone itself.

At last the head and trunk parted company. The carcass was
now cast loose and drifted several hundred feet off, where a
company of sharks attacked it.

Now it was a race with the killers. They had almost finished
off their dead friend. They began making passes at the
whale’s head, trying again to get at the tongue.

The head, still floating in the sea but secured by hooks, was
turned upside-down. Cutters neatly removed the lower jaw.
And there, exposed to view, was the elephant-size tongue.

It was severed at the root, a hook was fixed in it, the

windlass creaked, and the great spongy morsel so loved by
the killers began to rise. It was none too soon. Already the
killers were nipping at it feverishly. Several large bites were
torn out of it. Even when it was eight feet above the sea
three killers stood up on their tails snapping at it. Then it
was drawn out of their reach and hauled aboard.

It would have done Roger good to hear how the men

cheered. The rich fine oil of the tongue would put more
money into the pocket of every man aboard. ‘Don’t forget,’
said Jimson, ‘we owe it to the kid. Fifteen barrels in that
tongue if there’s a pint!’

The disappointed killers turned upon the floating carcass.

They scared away the sharks, but they could not scare away
the frigate birds, albatrosses, and gulls that had come in
swarms to this royal feast.
The cutters were not done with the head. It contained
another rich prize. Having turned it right side up a cutter
with a rope about his waist stood on the head and poked
about with his spade, hunting for the soft spot. When he
found it he cut a round opening about two feet across.

A bucket was let down through the hole and came up full of
clear oil as sweet-smelling as any perfume. Bucketful after
bucketful was hoisted to the deck and poured into casks-For
this oil was so pure that it did not need to be boiled in the
try-pots.

When the job was finished the mate did some adding up.
‘Two thousand gallons of oil we got out of that head!’ Now
the head itself was hoisted aboard. Even without the tongue
and empty of oil it was so heavy that its weight listed the
whaler far to starboard. When it lay at last on the deck it
seemed as big as a cabin. Hal had to look up to see the top
of it. He had known that a sperm-whale’s head is one-third of
the entire body, but it was hard to believe such a thing
without actually seeing it.

Then came the dirty, greasy job of trying-out. The head and
hide were cut into small pieces and dumped into the try-
pots. As fast as the oil was boiled out of the blubber it was
ladled out into casks.

Then the scraps of blubber from which the oil had been
boiled were thrown out on deck. Hal wondered why they
were not tossed overboard.

He soon saw why. When the fixe burned low no more wood
was put on it. Instead, the scraps of boiled-out blubber were
thrown in. Thus blubber boiled blubber. The whale was
actually cooking itself.
This saved both money and space. There would not be room
on a ship for the wood required to boil down all the whales
captured on an average voyage. Besides, it would be costly.
But the scraps were supplied free of charge by every whale
that came aboard.

Because of their oiliness they made an extremely hot fire.

But it was not as pleasant as a wood fire. It sent up a greasy
smudge of rank-smelling black smoke that made the men
choke and gag and cover their faces with grey masks. Sweat
running down their cheeks made rivers of white through the
grey.

As the knives attacked the blubber, spurts of oily blood

spattered the shirts and trousers of the workers.

Some of them saved their clothes by taking them off and

stowing them, and worked almost naked. Their bodies were
rapidly covered by layers of grease and grime and blood. It
got into their unshaven whiskers and uncut hair.

They were the sort of creatures one might see in a

nightmare. They were pictures no artist could paint. If one of
them had appeared suddenly in a Honolulu street women
and children would have run screaming to their homes.

And the crew could not look forward to soap and a hot
shower when the job was finished. Water was too precious to
be used to clean bodies that would only become dirty again.
Most of the mess could be scraped off with the back edge of
a knife, and the rest would wear off.

No, trying-out was not a pleasant job on an old-fashioned

whaler. Yet the men went at it with a will, because every
additional pint of oil meant more money in their pockets at
the end of the voyage.
Hal, slipping on the fat-slimy deck, hacking at the blubber
blanket with a long knife, shutting his eyes when the stuff
spurted into his face, coughing in the oily smoke, was as
grey, greasy, and grubby as anyone else on board.

This was not his idea of a good time. How delighted he and
his brother had been when their father proposed to let them
go on a number of scientific expeditions, skipping a year of
school because they were both too young for their classes.
They were thrilled with the prospect of a whole year of
hunting, fishing, and exploring. And a lot of it so far had
been great fun. But Hal had not looked forward to anything
like this - drowning in a sea of oil and blood and smoke, with
nothing to look forward to when the job was finished but a
cat-o’-nine-tails.

Any hope that the captain had forgotten about the flogging
was dispelled when Hal heard Grindle say to the mate:
‘What man o’ yours has the strongest right arm?’ ‘Well,
Bruiser throws the hardest harpoon.’ Bruiser was a great
brute with the strength of a gorilla. The mate might have
made a different answer if he had known that the captain
was not thinking of harpooning. ‘Good,’ said Grindle. ‘He’s
the one to swing the cat.’ ‘You mean, you still aim to string
up Hunt?’ ‘Of course!’ snapped Grindle. ‘Did you ever know
me to go back on a promise?’

The mate felt like saying: You never go back on a bad

promise. Just on good ones. He did not say it. He only
thought it. ‘I’ll tell Bruiser,’ he said.
Chapter 11

The great bull

A cry came from the masthead.

‘Whale away! Sperms on the lee bow! They blow! They

blow!’

The captain went up the mainmast like an electrified

monkey. He had no time now to think of ‘the Gent’. Hal must
wait for his flogging. Hal was almost sorry. He would rather
have had it over and done with than be for ever looking
forward to it.

The men piled into the boats. The tackle creaked and
groaned as the boats descended from the davits and struck
the bouncing waves.

‘Cast off!’ came the call. ‘Oars - all together! Jump to it!
Stroke - stroke - stroke!’

The spouts could be plainly seen. It was not just one whale
this time, but a whole pod.

Funny, the names we give to various groups of animals. We

speak of a flock of sheep, a herd of cattle, a gaggle of geese,
a pride of lions, a school of fish - and a pod of whales.

It was hard to tell how many whales were in this pod.

Perhaps half a dozen. Two of the spouts were very short,

indicating that they came from babies. Possibly all the
animals in the group were of one family.
In Hal’s boat the third mate, a small man named Brown,
stood at the steering-sweep. At the bow-oar was the big,
gorilla-like fellow, once a boxer, whom the men called
Bruiser. When the time came he would rise from his seat and
throw the harpoon. ^

Brown was small, but he had courage. He steered the boat

into the very centre of the pod of whales.

‘Steady now,’ he said. ‘Quiet with those oars. Don’t alarm

the beasties.’

The boat crept in between the two largest whales, probably

the father and mother of the two youngsters. The other two
whales might be uncles or aunts or just hangers-on.

Still unaware of the boat, the mother was giving milk to one
of the youngsters. This is done in much the same way as a
cow feeds a calf. But it is not quite as easy. If the baby whale
were to try to take its breakfast under the whale it would not
be able to breathe and would drown. Therefore the mother
rolls over on her side to bring the nipples near the surface.
The baby takes a nipple in its mouth and at the same time
can keep its nostrils above water.

The greatest difference between a cow and a whale is that

the cow gives milk only if the calf works to get it, but the
baby whale does not have to work. The mother is equipped
with a pump - a set of strong muscles which literally pump
the milk into the infant.

When the baby’s mouth slipped aside for a moment, Hal saw
a great jet of white milk shoot out over the waves with the
force of a stream from a fire-hose. The baby hastily fastened
on again so that no more of the precious liquid would be
lost.
Perhaps Nature made this unique pumping arrangement
because it would take too long for the infant to get its
breakfast by ordinary methods. The baby should have about
two hundred pounds of milk a day. The newborn whale may
be anywhere from fourteen to twenty-five feet long. It is
without exception the biggest baby in the world. A lot of
milk is needed to fill such a whale of a baby. If it had to pull
for every drop it might easily become discouraged and fail to
get the amount of food it needs for its rapidly growing body.

And how fast it does grow on this milk, much like cow’s milk
but extra rich in minerals, proteins, and fats. The weight of
the infant whale increases by nearly ten pounds every hour,
two hundred and forty pounds a day! Within a year it
doubles its length. At the age of four it becomes a mother or
father.

The boat crept into the centre of this family group. The eye-
sight of whales is not very good and the monsters were still
unaware of their danger. Their extremely keen ears did not
detect any sound, for the men did not speak and dipped
their oars silently.

Then Bruiser took up the harpoon. The haft of it touched the

gunwale of the boat and made a faint click.

That was enough. At once the mother threw a protecting

flipper over the baby, gave a spout of alarm, and turned to
face the boat. The great bull struck the water with his flukes.

‘Harpoon!’ yelled Brown. ‘Quick!’

Bruiser was both quick and strong. The harpoon went from
his hand as if shot from a gun. It sank deep into the neck of
the enormous male.
Bruiser, who looked like a giant among other men, was a
dwarf beside this monster. And yet his arm, as big as a pin in
comparison with one flipper, had made an earthquake go
shivering through the huge black mountain of flesh. Man
can move mountains, it is said, and Bruiser had done it.
Chapter 12

The giant nutcracker

Hal braced himself for a sleigh ride. Surely the beast would
take off on a wild race, towing the boat behind it as the
previous catch had done?

But this bull had a family to take care of. He was not going to
desert them. He wheeled about and came for the boat. He
sent up a spout that reminded Hal of the launching of a
satellite. The roar was like the Wast of a jet when it breaks
the sound barrier. Up and up went the column, house-high,
then spread out like the leaves of a palm, and the spray
falling from it sprinkled the men in the boat.

Now the two monsters both came head-on towards the boat.
The two enormous heads were like the jaws of a giant
nutcracker. Between them the stout cedar whaleboat would
be crushed as easily as a walnut.

‘Pull, pull!’ shouted Brown. ‘Pull for your lives!’

Five men pulled as they had never pulled before. Hal’s oar
cracked with the strain he put upon it.

The boat slid out from between two oncoming battering-

rams. The forehead of a sperm-whale is straight up and
down and some ten feet high. Now these two black cliffs met
in a crash that sent a shiver through both great bodies and
must have resulted in two whale-sized headaches.

The mother whale lay trembling, sheltering her babies under

her flippers, one on each side. The big bull, infuriated by his
failure to smash the boat and maddened by the pain of the
harpoon in his neck, thrashed the water into white foam. The
two who might have been uncles, for they both seemed to
be males, swam round and round, blowing furiously and
keeping the other two boats from entering the circle. Mr
Scott, standing up in one boat, was getting a picture of the
whole great show.

The big bull submerged and the water was suddenly quiet.
Hal could see the long black body like a submarine passing
just below the boat. He saw the tail whipping upward.

Then the world flew apart. The boat rose into the sky as if
being hauled up by unseen cables. It turned upside down.
Hal and his companions were flung out into space and
whirled round and round together with oars and tubs and
spars and gear of every sort.

Then he struck the water and went deep into it. Clawing his
way upward he collided with the underside of a whale. Hal’s
breath had already been knocked out of him and if he could
not get to the surface very soon he would drown.

Which way should he go? He should try to come out on the

flank, but he could not tell how the whale lay. If by mistake
he went towards the rear a whip of the tail might knock him
senseless. If he went forward it would be an even greater
mistake.

He swam, his back brushing against the whale’s hide. He

kept groping for a flipper. If he found one he would know
that he was on the whale’s flank and could come up to
breathe.
Presently his hand grasped something that might be a
flipper. He was about to pull himself up when he realized
that this was no flipper - it was the edge of the whale’s lower
jaw. He was practically inviting himself to dinner. One snap
of that great mouth and Hal Hunt would go to join his
ancestors.

He backed off at once and came up at the whale’s right side

behind the fin. He had never thought to see the boat again,
but there it was right-side up. It had landed luckily and had
very little water in it. Oars and gear floated all about. Hal,
after a deep breath or two to replenish his starved lungs,
joined with the other men in collecting the floating articles,
chucking them back into the boat and climbing in after
them. Third mate Brown counted heads. Not a man was
missing.

‘All right, boys,’ said Brown, raising his voice to be heard

above the spouts and splashes of the whales. ‘You’re lucky to
be alive. Oars! Let’s get out of here.’

‘Easier said than done!’ growled Bruiser.

The boat rammed head-on into a whale.

‘Try backing up,’ commanded the third mate.

A few strokes backward and the way was blocked by an

uncle.

The boat was trapped in whales. It lay in a bit of water no

bigger than’ a swimming-pool, with whales all round it. They
closed in upon it. The big bull, smarting from his wound,
began to rush off across the sea, and all the others with him.
The whole pod moved like one animal, and snugly packed in
the centre was the whaleboat, in peril of being crushed at
any moment between the great flanks.
And yet even at such a time a whaleman thinks of barrels of
oil. Brown seized the lance and went forward. The boat was
snugged up tightly to the side of the big bull. It was a
perfect set-up for a killing. A perfect chance for Brown to kill
the whale, an equally perfect chance that the whale and his
pals would kill every man aboard.

Brown stood in the bow with lance raised. He was enveloped

in spray thrown up by the speeding boat, and thrown down
by the spouting whales. He looked like a statue in a
fountain.

The lance went home. Deep, deep it went, and the whale in
one convulsive movement it struck the water with its head
and tail, raising its middle so that it looked like a great blade
arch over the waves.

‘Back away!’ yelled Brown.

But there was no room to back away. The eighty-foot arch

came down with a thunderous crash, barely missing the
boat. The wave produced by the fall of some one hundred
and twenty tons of whale washed the boat high up on to the
flank of an uncle, from which it slid back into the sea, still
right side up but full of water to the gunwales.

The men bailed furiously, expecting another attack at any

moment. But they looked up to see with astonishment that
the big whale had left them. It was swimming away from the
pod.

The reason was plain. The ship had drawn nearer, and the
great whale in its agony was about to attack it.

If that rock-hard head collided squarely with the keel below

the water-line the timbers would be stove in.
Many a sailing ship had been sunk in this fashion, and
occasionally a vessel under steam power or diesel.

Grindle in the rings could be heard bawling orders to the

helmsman. The ship began to veer to port. The whale was
ploughing ahead at a good twenty knots. The men watched
anxiously. Would the ship turn in time?’

Whale and ship met. Men breathed again. It had not been a
square hit. The whale struck the vessel’s side a glancing
blow and slid off towards the stern. The vessel shook itself
like a dog and the sails shivered, but her hull was still sound
beneath her.

The whale did not try again. He seemed to remember that he

had some unfinished business to attend to. Back he came
towards the boat, whose deadly irons were already draining
away his life. He was still spouting, but now his spout blazed
blood-red.

‘His chimney’s afire!’ yelled one of the men.

The monster sank out of sight.

‘He’s done for!’ shouted one.

‘No such luck!’ came the voice of the second mate whose
boat was still held off by the circling uncle. He called to
Brown:

‘Look out below!’

‘Aye aye, sir!’

Brown and his crew looked over the gunwales into the
depths. Hal at first could see nothing. Then he made out a
small white spot. It seemed only as big as a hand, but it was
rising and it rapidly grew in size as it rose.

Then he could make it out plainly. It was the open mouth of

the bull whale. The enormous teeth, each as big as Hal’s
head, were ready for action.

‘Full astern!’ yelled Brown.

The men pulled, but it was no use. A whale blocked the way,
and there was another ahead. With terrible speed the open
jaws rose towards the middle of the boat. The men tumbled
out of the way, some aft, some forward. One man was not
quick enough. He was caught between the two twenty-foot
jaws as they closed in, one on either side of the boat, and
crushed it like an eggshell.

The two ends of the crippled craft drifted apart, men in the
water clinging to them, and thanking their stars they had
something to cling to.

What had happened to the man who had been caught?

There was just a chance that he lay unharmed in the beast’s
mouth and would be thrown out when the jaws opened. Hal
watched anxiously.

But when the great mouth sprang open it was empty. The
monster that could attack and devour a cuttlefish almost as
large as itself had had no difficulty in swallowing this human
morsel.

If the man had escaped being injured by the closing teeth,

was he still alive? It was a fantastic thought. However, there
was the story of Jonah and the whale, a story that was
supposed to be based upon fact. The stomach of a whale
was as big as a good-sized cupboard. There might possibly
be enough air in it to sustain life for a short time. Now and
then a shark, still alive, has been taken from a whale’s
stomach. But a man is not so tough as a shark.

The mad bull thrashed about among the wreckage, his great
jaws crunching everything within reach. The men had to let
go their hold upon the pieces of the boat and swim to one
side. There was always the danger of an attack by the other
whales. Sharks had been drawn by the smell of blood and
Hal splashed vigorously to keep them off.

He yelled a warning to one of his companions as he saw a

shark about to seize his foot. The man, numbed by fear and
cold, did not act in time. The razor teeth closed on his leg
and he was drawn down.

Hal at once dived down in the hope of rescuing him. He

explored the blue depths in vain. There were plenty of
sharks about, but no sign of the man and the shark that had
taken him.

He battled his way back through the gleaming silver bodies

to the surface and came up by the rolling flank of the big
whale.
Chapter 13

Wild ride
His hand struck something hard and cold. It was the harpoon
in the whale’s neck. Instinctively he grasped it and felt
himself lifted out of the water and carried away at high
speed.

The bull, having destroyed the boat, had now changed his
tactics and was trying to run from the pain that tormented
him. The rest of the pod followed at a slower pace. Sharks
snapped alongside and Hal drew his feet up out of their way.
He was thankful to the big bull. The monster that he had
been helping to kill was now saving him.

He looked back and saw with relief that the two other boats
were now able to come in and pick up the survivors.

Would anyone think about him? Some of them must have

seen him dive, but perhaps no one had seen him rise again,
because he had come up on the off side of the whale. They
could not know what a wild ride he was getting.

Many a man had ridden horseback, camel-back, elephant-

back, and even ostrich-back, but who had ever gone for a
ride whale-back?

In other circumstances he might have thought it was great

sport. It was like riding on the bridge of a submarine before
it submerges.

Submerges. That was an unhappy thought. If this living

submarine took a notion to dive, what would happen to its
rider?

The bull, as if the same idea had just occurred to him, slid
below the surface. Hal caught his breath as his head went
under, and held on grimly. Perhaps this was just a surface
dive. On the other hand it might be a ‘sound’, a dive far
down to a depth of as much as a quarter of a mile. The whale
might stay down for an hour. Three minutes of that would be
quite enough to exhaust Hal’s air, and the terrific pressure
would crush him as flat and dead as a pancake.

But he had no sooner thought of these things than his head

rose again above the waves. The whale sent up a terrific
spout of blood and steam. And Hal remembered being told
that a whale spouting blood never sounds, perhaps because
its pierced lungs and drained arteries cannot retain enough
oxygen for a long stay under water. However this may be,
the big bull made only brief dips below water, coming up
within a minute or so.

Every time he emerged he blasted more blood into the air

which showered down upon Hal until he was so plastered
from head to toe that his own mother would not have known
him.

Wherever this deposit touched his skin it stung like fire. It

was not the blood that caused this violent irritation, but the
poison gases expelled from the monster’s lungs. The wind
blew these vapours back upon Hal along with the blood.

During a whale’s stay of a half hour or an hour beneath the

sea the pure air with which it has filled its lungs gradually
changes, much as it does in the human body. Perhaps if a
human could bottle up his breath for a half-hour or an hour it
would, when expelled, be poisonous too.
The whale’s spout is not kind to any living thing that gets In
its way. A sailor who looked over the gunwale of his ship just
as a whale below happened to spout got the blast full in his
face; the skin itched terribly and a day later peeled off so
that he looked as if he had come through a fire. Fortunately
his eyes had automatically closed when the jet struck him.
Eyes fully exposed to the fumes may be seriously damaged
or even blinded.

If the healthy whale’s spout is poisonous, the breath of a

wounded whale is much more so. Again, the whale is like
you and me. When we are sick or suffering or badly worried,
the breath is not apt to be as sweet as when we are healthy
and happy.

Hal, feeling the smart on his skin, was learning the hard way
about the breathing of a whale and prudently closed his
eyes whenever it spouted.

He looked back anxiously. No one was coming to his rescue.

The two surviving boats had gone back to the ship. His mad
race had covered more than a mile and every moment he
was being carried farther and farther away.

Should he slide off into the sea and try to swim back? He

would never make it. The water was alive with sharks. On
both sides of the blood-spouting whale their long silver
bodies flashed through the water as they kept up with the
monster that they hoped soon to devour. The picture of the
seaman hauled down by the shark was still fresh in Hal’s
mind. He had no desire to go to Davy Jones’s locker by that
route. His only chance was to hang on, and hope.

Would this great bull ever give up? He still ploughed along
like a speed-boat. As the distance lengthened the ship
gradually sank below the horizon. Now the hull was gone,
the deck had disappeared. He could still see the masts, but
they were steadily growing shorter.

He strained his eyes, hoping to see someone at the

masthead. There was no lookout in the rings. Captain
Grindle had gone down when the whale had attacked the
ship.

Probably right now, thought Hal, they’re holding a funeral

service for those two poor fellows.

He was almost right. A funeral service was being held, but it

was for three poor fellows, not two. Hal was counted among
the dead. Roger was roused from his bunk to hear the sad
news.

‘Sorry, kid,’ said third mate Brown. ‘Your brother dived to

help a chum who had just been pulled down by a shark.
That’s the last we saw of either of them.’

‘But you don’t really know that he died,’ Roger insisted.

‘Look, kid,’ Brown explained patiently, ‘when a man goes

down and doesn’t come up, there’s only one answer. The
boats that came in to pick us up - they rowed all over the
place to make sure they weren’t missing anybody. No use
fooling yourself. The sharks got him. We looked everywhere.
You can trust us. We know our business.’

‘But you don’t know my brother. He’s met sharks before and
he didn’t let them take him. I’ll bet he’s alive. Couldn’t we
go out and look again?’

‘It ain’t no use,’ said Brown. ‘But if you want to ask the
Captain -‘ Roger at once went to Captain Grindle. ‘Captain,
may we take out a boat and look for my brother?’
The captain looked as indignant as if he had been asked to
send a boat to the moon.

‘You impudent young squirt, what do you think we are? Do

you suppose we have nothing to do but hunt for gents who
don’t know enough to take care of themselves?’

‘But that’s just it,’ said Roger. ‘He does know how to take
care of himself. That’s why I feel he’s still alive.’

‘And where d’you suppose he’d be?’ sneered Grindle. ‘In a

mermaid’s palace at the bottom of the sea, I suppose. He
wasn’t afloat, or he woulda sung out when the boats went
looking. Or perhaps you think he got flung so high in the air
that he hasn’t come down yet.’ He grinned his evil sarcastic
grin, then turned harsh again. ‘We’ve done all we can for
your fool brother. We gave him a nice funeral service, some
pretty words from Holy Scriptures, and a watery grave. Your
brother just wasn’t tough enough for this life. It should be a
lesson to all gents who think they’re real he-men.’

He gripped Roger by the shoulder and brought his porcupine

beard uncomfortably close to the boy’s face. ‘And if you
really want to know what I think happened to your brother,
I’ll tell you. He knew he was going to be flogged within an
inch of his life if he came back to this ship. That put him in a
funk. When a man is scared he can’t defend himself. Your
brother was scared and the sharks got him.’
Chapter 14

Alone
In the meantime, Hal, very much alive, was beginning to
face the possibility that he would not be alive much longer.

The whale was steadily losing blood. In due time it must roll
over, ‘fin out’, as whalers say when a whale dies. Then the
sharks would close in and make a dinner on the carcass,
with Hal as dessert.

Even if the whale lived the prospect was not bright. It would
plough on far away into unknown seas. Its rider would bake
in the heat of the tropical sun by day and, always wet to the
skin, would shiver in the cold night wind that sweeps across
the ocean after dark even on the Equator. He would endure
the agonies of hunger and thirst until his mind would fail,
his grip on the iron would loosen, and he would slip off into
the sea.

The masts of the Killer had disappeared. There was nothing

to be seen but a million humping waves, He felt terribly
alone.

Then he remembered that he was not alone. Beneath him,

inside this animal submarine, there was another human
being.

Suppose this modern Jonah was alive. What dreadful

thoughts he must be having as he found himself imprisoned
in this living tomb.
Was he fighting to get out? If he could escape from the
stomach through the gullet into the mouth, what were his
chances? The muscles of swallowing would force him back
into his prison. Or he would be crushed by the huge teeth.
At the very best he might slip out of the mouth whenever it
opened, but then he would only be the helpless prey of the
sharks.

More likely there was no breath of life left in him, and Hal
was truly alone.

He was startled to hear a deep groan.

Had he really heard it, or was his own mind beginning to

give way? Then it came again, a sad and painful sound. He
realized that the mournful voice he heard was the voice of
the suffering whale beneath him.

He felt at that moment that he would never want to kill

another whale.

Hal was not merely imagining that he heard the voice of the
whale. Whales are not dumb. They have no vocal chords, yet
they make a great variety of sounds. Some naturalists
believe that whales ‘talk’, or at least signal to each other by
means of sounds. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
has recorded the sounds by tape recorder. The zoologist Ivan
T. Sanderson says in Follow the Whale: ‘It is now known that
all whales, and especially porpoises and some dolphins,
keep up a tremendous racket underwater, lowing like cows,
moaning, whistling, and making chuckling sounds …
Belugas have an enormous vocabulary of different sounds,
which gives rise to their popular name among seamen of
“sea canaries”. They twitter, whistle, scream, gurgle,
chuckle, hoot, and make strange popping and puffing
noises.’
And it is not surprising that the whale has a voice. After all,
it is not a fish, but a mammal like a cat or dog or the reader
of this book.

Some millions of years ago it had four legs and waddled

about on land. Perhaps it could not get enough to eat on
shore to fill its great body and took to swimming after food.
It became more and more used to the water, and after
thousands of years its useless legs dwindled away.

The remains of them are still there. The front legs have
changed into flippers, but inside each flipper may be found
five toes left over from the time when whales walked the
earth. And deep in the rear part of the whale are two useless
bones, the remains of what were once hind legs.

So, thought Hal, this fellow is my cousin.

It helped a little. He did not feel quite so lost and lonely in

this watery waste when he remembered that the creature
below him was, like himself, warm-blooded, breathed air,
had a skeleton, brain, heart, and blood vessels much like his
own, and could feel pain, grief, or joy as he could.
Chapter 15

How to steer a whale

The whale frequently changed direction. When south did not
get him away from his misery he tried west, then east. If only
he would head back towards the ship!

Hal wondered if there was any way to steer a whale. The

whale is one of the most intelligent of beasts. Hal had seen,
on his father’s animal farm, how less intelligent animals than
the whale could be guided here and there,

A horse even without a bridle could be steered by pressure

of the rider’s knees. A camel could be turned to the right or
left by the rider’s bare toes tickling his neck on one side or
the other. The mahout on an elephant’s back could make
this mountain of flesh go to one side or the other by
touching one of the big ears with his pole. And Hal had seen
a rhino mother push her young one along ahead of her and
direct its course by pressing her horn against its withers on
the left side or the right.

But how to apply this knowledge to the problem of steering

a whale was quite beyond him. Perhaps if he pulled out the
lance and used it to stab one of the whale’s ten-foot cheeks
it would turn the other way.

ft was not a bad idea and quite possibly it might have

worked - but Hal couldn’t do it. The big bull had become a
person to him, almost a friend. He could not add to its
suffering. ‘The Cap is right,’ he said to himself. ‘I’m a softie.’
Hal still held on to the harpoon with one hand. His other
hand held the rope which trailed away from the harpoon
back over the waves, its end having been torn loose from
the broken boat.

Could he use this rope? The idea appealed to his sense of

humour. He laughed aloud at the notion of putting a bridle
on a whale. His laugh frightened himself, it seemed so out of
place in this desolate silence.

Well, anyhow, he could try it. He gathered up several

fathoms of the line, looped it as he had so often done for
lassoing animals on the farm, and threw it twenty feet
forward so that the bight dropped just beyond the animal’s
head and was drawn tight at the mouth. Hal held two reins
in his hands. He felt like Neptune, lord of the sea, driving his
chariot over the waves.

According to the sun, he calculated that the ship was a little

east of north. He must pull on the right rein. As he began to
do so the bull, annoyed by this thing like the tentacle of an
octopus that rubbed across his lips, opened his jaws and
took the line firmly in his teeth.

Hal pulled manfully on the right rein. It might have worked

on a one-ton horse, or even on a seven-ton elephant. It had
no effect whatever on the one-hundred-and-twenty-ton bull
of the sea.

No effect except to annoy still more the whale which bow

savagely bit the rope in two. Hal hauled in the rope and
looked at the place where it had been cut apart as if with a
knife. He had had ho idea that a whale’s teeth could be so
sharp.

All right, that was no good. But Hal’s inventive mind did not
give up. He must try, and keep on trying - his life depended
upon it. What else could he do?
He might entangle the left fin in the rope so that it could not
work properly. He had once seen in the aquarium a fish with
a disabled ventral fin. Because only one fin was working the
fish tended to turn in one direction.

But a whale does not swim like a fish. A fish uses its fins as
well as its tail to propel it through the water. The whale uses
only its enormous twenty-foot-wide tail. The fins are used
merely for balancing. Hal saw that they were quite
motionless. He gave up the idea of lassoing a fin.

What else did a whale have that might influence his

direction? It had ears.

Hanging on to the harpoon rope he slid down to one of the

ears, very small for a brute of such size. He plugged the ear
with rope and waited for results. There were none. The whale
continued steadily in the same direction. Hal removed the
rope from the ear.

But the eyes. Why hadn’t he thought of them before?

A whale’s eyes are planted in the sides of the head, not the
front. The whale can see nothing behind him and very little
ahead. He sees to the left with the left eye and to the right
with the right eye.

Like a bird, thought Hal. Or a horse.

He had once owned a horse named Right. He was called that

because he always had a tendency to go to the right. He was
blind in the left eye. Any animal likes to see where it is
going, and since this horse could see right he went right.

It was always necessary for the driver to keep a tight left rein
if he wished to go straight. A normal horse would continue
straight even if the reins were dropped. Not so Right. As
soon as the reins went slack he would begin to shy away
slightly from the world he could not see and which might
contain any number of dangers and edge over into the world
that his good eye told him was safe.

The ocean, too, has its dangers. The sensible whale would
want to avoid them - dangers such as rocks and shoals,
schools of sharks or swordfish, the giant cuttlefish with his
horny beak, and men in boats. If the whale could see only to
one side, his instinct for safety should cause him to favour
that side.

Hal put his theory to the test. He stripped off his blood-

caked shirt and let it hang from his hand so that its folds
covered the whale’s left eye.

The great bull seemed to take no notice. He had been going

due west and he kept going due west. Hal persisted for a
good five minutes, but there was no change.

Bitterly disappointed, he was about to haul up his shirt when

he happened to glance again at the sun. It was not quite
where it had been. Yes, the whale was veering ever so
slightly to the right. His direction was a shade north of west,
then a definite west-north-west, then full north-west.

Hal was in an uncomfortable and dangerous position.

Huddled part-way down the whale’s left flank, he was
hanging on to the harpoon rope with one hand and with the
other operating his blinder. It was hard to block the whale’s
vision continually because gusts of wind kept blowing the
shirt aside. Hal was so close to the water that the sharks
took a great interest in him and frequently thrust their jaws
above the surface in an effort to reach a leg or an arm.

But the whale was steadily edging towards what he could

see and away from what he could not see. From north-west
he slowly swung to north. When he had turned a few
degrees east of north Hal was satisfied that his black chariot
was now headed for the ship. He took away the blinder and
climbed up the rope to the higher and safer point beside the
harpoon.

But his work was not done. Every once in a while the bull
would take a notion to charge off towards another point of
the compass. Then Hal would have to slip down and cover
sometimes the left eye, sometimes the right, to get his
speed-boat back on course.

And wasn’t the speed-boat slowing down? That was new

cause for worry. The tips of the Killer’s masts were now
above the horizon. But there was still a long way to go. The
whale’s enormous flukes beat less rapidly, his groans were
more frequent, his spouts more thick with blood and only
half as high as they had been. At any moment he might give
up and roll over fin out, throwing his rider to the sharks.

Hal focused his tired and poisoned eyes upon the mastheads
of the whaling ship. He thought he could make out a black
blob near the head of the foremast. Soon he was sure, and
his discouragement and fear gave way to new hope. There
was a lookout in the foremast rings. Hal shouted for joy. His
own voice frightened him, it was so quickly soaked up by the
great silence.

Perhaps the lookout would not see the whale after all. The
man at the masthead watches for a white spout, but the
spout of this whale was a dull red and now so low that it
would scarcely appear above the wave-tops. The whale’s
body might be seen, or it might not, for the dying bull was
not swimming as high out of the water as before and his
tiring flukes made no splash.
Hal could not see who was in the rings. He hoped it was a
good man, one with keen eyes. Hal’s fate depended upon
those eyes.

The whale was weakening fast and the throb of his twenty-
foot propeller almost stopped at times. Then with a savage
grunt he would make a new spurt forward. These spurts
became slower and shorter until at last the monster lay
without motion, wallowing in the waves. As a last gesture of
defiance, the great bull sent up a column of red mist into the
sky.
Chapter 16

Rescue
Hal thought he heard a cry across the sea. It might have
been only the scream of a gull - but it might have been the
call of the lookout. He listened intently. Now he heard it
again and there was no mistake. It came faint but clear:

‘Blows! Blows!’

Thank the Lord for the sharp eyes of that lookout, thought
Hal. He had been seen. No, not he, but the whale. He himself
would not be visible at that distance, especially since his
colour was exactly the same as that of the whale’s back,
both painted dull red by the bloody spouts.

He saw another figure climb into the rings. That would be

the captain. The lookout went down out of sight.

‘Bless his hide, whoever he is,’ said Hal fervently.

It seemed a very long time before the boats appeared. The

men in. those boats were coming after a whale - they could
have no idea that a man was aboard.

Hal prepared to give them the surprise of their lives.

He lay flat on the far side so that he could not be seen by

the men in the approaching boats.
What a pleasure it was to hear human voices once again, so
much more cheering than the groan of a perishing whale.

‘All right. Pull up alongside.’ It was the voice of the second

mate. ‘What in Heaven’s name do we have here? Look, he
has a harpoon in him! And a lance! I’m staggered if it isn’t
that same old bull - the one that gave us all that trouble and
then ran out on us.’

Other voices chimed in.

‘Whatever brought him back!’

‘Perhaps he came back to do us in. Look out for him!’

‘No, he’s done for. He’ll roll over any minute.’

Hal thought it was time to make his appearance. He crawled

up so that just his head showed above the whale’s back.

‘Am I seeing things?’ cried someone. ‘What’s that?’

They might well be puzzled. Hal’s face and head were caked
over with half-dried blood.

Hal stood up, red from head to foot.

The men stared in disbelief.

‘It’s the devil himself,’ muttered one, crossing himself.

It’s Hal!’ cried Roger leaping to his feet. Hal grinned a

bloody but happy grin to see his brother whom he had
almost feared he would never set eyes on again.

He slid down into the nearest boat. At once he was

bombarded with questions.
‘Where you been?’

‘We saw you dive but you didn’t come up. What happened?’
‘How far did he take you?’ ‘How did you get so stinkin’
bloody?’

The questions were interrupted by the big bull. Irritated by

the presence of the boats, he turned to attack them. He
opened his great boatsize jaws. But he was not his old self.
His movements were sluggish, and the oarsmen easily
pulled their craft out of his way.

The huge jaws came together with a thunderous crash. The

bull sent up a last brave spout that fluttered like a red
banner in the wind. A low groan came from the depths of
him and he rolled over, belly up.

‘Thow a line over that tail,’ ordered the mate, ‘and we’ll tow
him to the ship.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Hal. ‘First we’d better try to save the
other chap.’

‘What other? Were there two of you?’

‘Yes.’

The men looked at each other understandingly. Hal’s

terrifying experience must have affected his mind.

Try to calm down,’ the second mate said. ‘There isn’t any
other.’

T don’t have time to explain,’ Hal said, snatching a knife. ‘If

we’re quick we may get him out alive.’
Avoiding the men who tried to stop him, he leaped out on to
the dead whale’s white belly. He began to make a lengthwise
cut over the region of the stomach. The men looked on in
astonishment, wagging their heads.

‘Crazy as a loon,’ one said.

The skin on a whale’s underside is more tender than

elsewhere. Hal had soon made an opening eight feet long. If
the men wanted any further proof that he was crazy, they
got it when he dropped through the opening into the
stomach of the whale.

He found himself in a chamber some fourteen feet long and

five across, lit only by the light coming through the slit
above. He felt the sting of gastric juices on his face and his
bare trunk.

He wondered if anybody had ever before gone inside a

whale. Probably. In Africa when an elephant is killed the
hungry blacks go inside to get the heart, kidneys, and other
choice portions of meat. And there is much more room in a
whale than in an elephant.

Groping about, his hand struck something that might be the

horny beak of a cuttlefish. Then he found his companion. He
lifted him so that his head emerged from the slit along with
his own.

When the men in the boats saw this strange sight they could
well believe it was not Hal who had gone crazy, but they
themselves. Their amazement grew when Hal climbed out,
and pulled the other man out after him.

Now several men leaped up beside him and willing hands

eased the still form down into the boat.
The mate tested for respiration and heartbeat. Hal hoped
desperately. If a shark had been brought out alive from the
stomach of a whale, why not a man? The mate finished his
examination, and shook his head.

‘It was a bit too much for him.’

Two men had paid for this whale with their lives. The high
cost of cold cream, Hal thought. Whale oil was used to make
cold cream as well as many other useful products. But did
the young woman who sat before a mirror applying
cosmetics to her face realize what they had cost - not in
money, but in struggle, strain, and life itself? Did the person
washing his hands with soap containing whale oil realize
what it had cost to put it in his hands? The users of
glycerine, margarine, paints, varnishes, textiles, fertilizer,
cattle fodder, vitamins made with whale-liver oil, hormones
obtained from the glands of the whale, many life-saving
drugs, gifts from the whale to man - did the people who
made daily use of these things ever think of the men who
had fought and died to provide them?

Not to mention the monarch of the sea that had perished so

that his human cousins might be a little more healthy and
happy.

The line was put over the tail and the long job of towing the
monster back to the ship began. Meanwhile the questions
continued.

Hal told how he had steered the great whale.

‘Now you’re spoofing us,’ said one man. ‘Steer a whale, my

grandmother!’

But the other men were inclined to believe Hal. After all,
there was the whale. Durkins turned to the expert on whales,
Mr Scott. ‘What does the Professor say?’

‘Hal was lucky enough or smart enough,’ Scott said, ‘to hit
on something that has been known to zoologists for a long
time - that any animal with eyes in the sides of its head
instead of in front will tend to favour the side with better
vision. It’s a scientific fact More than that, it’s just common
sense. You take more interest in what you can see than what
you can’t. Suppose you had eyes in the back of your head
instead of in front. Would you want to walk forward?’

‘No, backward,’ said Durkins.

‘Right. And it’s the same way with the whale. If his view is
cut off to one side, he’ll edge over to the other. But not
everybody would have thought of it. I think you owe Hunt
your thanks for bringing home a fine whale.’

‘Bet your life!’ agreed Durkins, and the rest of the men
chimed in. They began to speculate on how many barrels of
oil the monster would yield and how much extra pay it
would mean for every man.

‘But,’ Hal said, ‘the fellow you really ought to thank is that
lookout. Without him, you wouldn’t have had a whale. He
must have been pretty sharp, because the whale was low in
the water and wasn’t spouting white.’

‘Do you want to know who the lookout was?’ asked Durkins.

‘I certainly do.’

‘He was your kid brother.’

Hal grinned at Roger and his heart was pretty full. There was
a lot he wanted to say, but all he could say now was: ‘Good
job!’
The kid wouldn’t believe us when we told him you were
dead,’ the mate went on. ‘Guess he knew you were a hard
nut to crack. He pestered the Captain till Grindle let him go
up in the rings and watch.’

‘I thought I might see you hanging on to a piece of wreckage

somewhere,’ Roger said. ‘Then this whale came along. I
didn’t see you on its back but I had a sort of hunch you
weren’t far away.’

‘You sure surprised us when you popped up over that

whale’s back,’ Durkins said. ‘I hope to see the Cap’s face
when his eyes light on you. He thinks you’re at the bottom of
the sea.’

A sudden shadow fell upon the boats. The men looked up to

see that a dark grey mist had swallowed the sun.

From the cloud-bank long tails of mist spiralled down to the

sea.

‘Fog!’ said Durkins., ‘In ten minutes we won’t be able to see

a thing. Pull, boys, while you can still see the ship.’

Heavy wet curtains of fog settled down until they brushed

the wave-tops. Seen through the curtains, the ship came
and went as if it was only a dream, not an actual vessel on a
real ocean. The men looked uneasy. Sailors are superstitious,
and to their minds the sea is never so mysterious as when
veiled in fog. It is at such times that the Flying Dutchman is
seen, or imagined. And such ghostly visions appear as those
described by Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

A sighing sound came from the heavens. Some of the men

fingered charms that hung round their necks, and their lips
moved as they repeated silently magical words that were
supposed to fend off the evil eye. Now the ship was gone
and the fog closed in like a smothering blanket over the
boats.

The mate tried to pep up his men: ‘It won’t last long. Keep at
it, boys. Only a cable’s length to go.’

At one moment there was nothing ahead. At the next

moment the boats were ramming their noses into the hull of
the Killer. A man clambered up the ship’s fore-chains with
the whale’s tow-line and made it fast. The boats were eased
back to the rope ladder that rose to the deck.

The fog was so heavy that the men in the boats could not
see Captain Grindle at the top of the ladder, nor could the
captain see them. But he could hear their voices and the
clugging of the oars in the oarlocks.

‘Ahoy, down there!’ called the captain.

It was the second mate who should have called back.

Instead, he put his finger to his lips, signalling his men to be
quiet. Then he whispered to Hal:

‘Let’s give the old geezer the scare of his life. You go up
alone. I’ll bet he’ll think you’re a zombie.’
Chapter 17

The ghost in the fog

Hal climbed the rope ladder. He tried to move without
making a sound. He raised his face and saw Captain Grindle
looking down. The captain’s eyes were great balls of terror.
He tried to speak, but could not. He backed away from the
rail as Hal rose before him.

The fog-blinded captain could see very little and could not
believe what he saw. This thing, plastered with red from
head to foot, looked more like a demon than a man. It
reminded Grindle of the Gent. But it could not be. The Gent
was drowned and a funeral service had been said over him.

This vision, appearing and disappearing through the fog,

must be his ghost. It had come back to take revenge. The
captain suddenly regretted that he had ever insulted the
Gent or threatened him with a flogging.

Hal stood up on the gunwale. His burning eyes looking out

from the mask of blood terrified the captain. Grindle backed
away, muttering: ‘No, no!’ And again: ‘No, no! Don’t.’

The other men were now climbing to the deck to see the fun.
Hal spread his arms as if he were about to take off from his
perch on the gunwale and fly at his enemy. The captain, still
backing up, stumbled against the rim of a pan of porridge
that the cook had put out to cool and sat down in it,
splashing the pasty stuff in all directions.
He was up again in a hurry and retreated to the
companionway that led down to his cabin.

At this distance he felt safer and began to bluster.

‘You, whoever you are, get down off that rail. If you don’t, I’ll
shoot you down.’ He began to reach back for his revolver.

Before he could touch it, Hal was swinging towards him at

the end of a clew-line from the mainsail yard-arm. The fog
hid the line. All the captain could see was an indistinct
something flying straight towards him through mid-air like
an angel of Satan.

With a bellow of fear he started down the companionway,

lost his footing, tumbled and bumped all the way to the
bottom, scrambled into his cabin and locked the door.

He lay trembling in his bunk, fearfully watching the door. A

phantom that could float through the air could certainly
come through a locked door. Or through a porthole. One of
the portholes was open and he crawled over to close it, but
before he could do so he heard a strange sound.

Roars of laughter drifted down from the deck. All his men
were screaming with joy. What was so funny? He listened to
catch any words. He heard shouts of: ‘Good boy, Hunt!’ ‘You
gave him a proper fright.’ ‘That will teach the old bully.’
‘Three cheers for Hunt!’

The captain stopped trembling. He wiped the sweat from his

forehead and a cold rage crept over him.

So they were laughing at him. The thing he had seen was

not a ghost, it was Hunt himself. But how could that be? He
had buried Hunt and logged him as dead. The log-book lay
open on the desk and there was the entry:
Seaman Hal Hunt, losing his life through his own
carelessness and stupidity, was this day consigned to the
sea with all due rites of funeral, though undeserving of such
honour.

There it was. He was dead and gone and buried, but he was
alive and on deck at this very moment. There should be a
law against this sort of thing. A man once logged dead had
no right to come back. It was a breach of discipline and
ought to be punished.

The captain had so enjoyed writing that item in that log -

now he regretfully crossed it out. This spoiled the
appearance of the page: that was Hal’s fault and he would
have to suffer for it. The captain was now boiling with
resentment and injured pride. They would laugh at him,
would they? Well, he would have the last laugh.

He took out his revolver and made sure that every chamber
was full. He was the only man on board with a gun. That
thought made him swell up with importance. It did not occur
to him that only a coward would use a gun against unarmed
men.

Thanks to his gun he could command obedience. He would

make an example of this Hunt, such a terrible example that
no man on board would ever forget it. This fellow must be
flogged within an inch of his life. Forty strokes of the cat was
the usual punishment on the Killer - this time it would be
eighty. With what pleasure he would write it down in his log!

Why not write it now? Then he would be bound to carry it

through. Nothing could stop him. He would have to do it
because it was already written. He wrote:

On this day, Seaman Hal Hunt, guilty of defying established

authority, received eighty lashes.
There it was, in black and white, and this time he would not
have to cross it out. It was going to be done, and at once.

Gritting his teeth on this resolve the captain unlocked the

door and went up the companionway, gun in hand. At the
top, he peered round the door-jamb to see what was going
on.

The men were marching round the deck carrying Hal Hunt
on their shoulders. They were laughing, cheering, shouting:
‘Hooray for Hunt!’

With a grim smile on his porcupine face, Captain Grindle

aimed his revolver just above the head of the man who had
returned from the grave.

He fired. The bullet whizzed above the crew and thudded

into the mainmast. The men stopped cheering. Hal was
dropped to the deck. Some of the men ran to the fo’c’sle.
Others hid behind the masts.

Captain Grindle, much pleased with the effect of his shot,

strode out on to the deck. He was every inch the master, and
he gloried in the feeling.

‘Bruiser!’ he bawled. ‘Come forward!’

The ex-prizefighter stepped out, cringing like a small boy. T

didn’t do anything, sir,’ he said, his eye on the captain’s
gun.

‘Spread-eagle that man!’

‘What man?’

‘The Gent.’
An angry murmur ran through the crowd. Bruiser stood
irresolute. Second mate Durkins cast about for a way to gain
time.

‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ he said, ‘the man the whale got -
his body is in the boat. Shouldn’t we give him a funeral
first?’

‘He’s already had his funeral. Tell Sails to stitch him up in a

piece of canvas and dump him overboard.’

The man nicknamed Sails because it was his job to look after
the ship’s canvas, retired to perform this unhappy duty.

The captain would not let himself be side-tracked from his

purpose. ‘Bruiser, did you hear my order?’

The second mate tried again.

‘Sir, this man Hunt has given us a big whale. It’s well over a
hundred barrels, sir. He brought it back single-handed.’

The captain flew into a rage. He fired twice and men

dropped to the deck to get out of the way of the singing
bullets.

‘What!’ he cried. ‘Am I to be questioned and corrected by my

own officers? The next time I fire it won’t be for fun. And
you,’ he pointed the gun at Bruiser, ‘will be my target if you
don’t carry out my orders. Spread-eagle the Gent!’

Bruiser still hesitated, and the captain might have carried

out his threat if Hal had not stepped forward.

‘Better do as he says,’ Hal said, and placed himself with his

face against the mainmast and his arms stretched forward
around the mast, his legs braced apart. Bruiser bound the
two hands together, thus tightly securing the victim to the
mast. From a utility chest the captain pulled out the cat-o’-
nine-tails and put it in Bruiser’s hand.

‘Eighty lashes!’ he ordered.

Again an angry growl went through the crew. Then Scott, the
scientist, pushed his way through the crowd and faced
Captain Grindle.

‘Captain, may I have a word with you - in private?’

‘Can’t it wait till this is done?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Scott. Placing his hand on the captain’s
arm he led him back out of earshot.

‘Captain, I am a passenger on this ship and not one of your

crew, so you may allow me to speak to you frankly. I would
earnestly advise you not to flog this man. Flogging belongs
to the old days - it is forbidden by modern maritime law.’

‘Now let me tell you something,’ said the angry captain.

‘This ship belongs to the old days. So do I. I’ve always made
my own law aboard ship and I intend to keep right on
making it. If that’s all you have to say to me, you’re wasting
your time.’

‘It’s not quite all,’ said Scott, trying to keep his voice polite
and reasonable. ‘Hunt may have been impertinent - but I
think you might excuse him since he has just done you a
very great service.’

‘Done me a great service? How?’

‘By bringing in this whale. It was really a very remarkable

feat. The whale, as you well know, is worth round about
three thousand pounds, and a good proportion of the profit
goes to you. The rest will be divided among the men.
Naturally they are very happy about it and Hunt is very
popular with them. If you have him flogged, I don’t think
they’ll stand for it.’

The captain’s face behind the black bristles flushed an

angry red. ‘You threaten me with mutiny? Do you know I
could clap you in irons for that? You’re a passenger, but
remember I’m master over passengers as well as crew. You’ll
do well to keep a civil tongue in your head.’

‘I’m trying to keep a civil tongue,’ said Scott. What else

could he say to influence this stubborn bully? He would try
flattery. ‘I know you’re the master, and I know you’re a
strong man and I know that even without a gun you’re the
equal of any man on board.’

‘Equal?’ snapped the captain. I’m better. There’s not a man

in the crew who could stand up to me in a fair fight.’

‘Not even Hunt?’

The captain fell into the trap.

‘Hunt? Why, I could take him apart with my bare hands.’

‘Now you’re talking!’ exclaimed Scott, pretending to be lost

in admiration, That sounds like a real man. No gun. A man
like you doesn’t need a gun. You could leave it in your cabin.
You wouldn’t be afraid to do that. Not you.’

‘Afraid?’ scoffed Grindle, ‘I’ll show you how afraid I am of

that young squirt.’

He took out the revolver and went down the companionway

to his cabin. He came back without the gun. He strode up
the deck to the mainmast.
Chapter 18

Grindle takes a blubber bath

‘Loose that man,’ he ordered.

Bruiser, wonderingly, unbound Hal’s hands. Hal turned

about to face the captain.

Grindle’s pop eyes swept haughtily over his crew like a pair
of searchlights.

‘Breach of discipline,’ he said, ‘don’t go on the Killer. It has

to be punished. Yesterday this man made insulting remarks
about my ability to run a ship. Today he has the impudence
to come back from the dead and try to scare me with a pack
o’ ghost tricks. He didn’t scare me a bit. I’m so little scared
of him I’m going to give him a choice. A choice between the
cat and these two hands!’

He stopped for a moment to let the idea soak in.

‘It ain’t fair,’ came a voice from the crowd. ‘You got a gun.’

‘No gun,’ said Grindle. ‘It’s below decks. A man like me don’t
need a gun. The science fellow says so, and he’s right. Don’t
heed a cat neither. Just my own bare hands, that’s enough.
And when I get done with this varmint he won’t have one
bone connected to another,’

He turned to Hal. ‘Or perhaps you’d rather have the eighty?

Whichever you prefer. Our aim is to oblige.’ He bowed in
mock courtesy.
It was not easy for Hal to decide. Eighty lashes would, he
knew, leave him an unconscious bleeding heap on the deck.
Men had died under the blows of the cat-o’-nine-tails. The
alternative was a hand-to-hand fight with Grindle. That
could be tough too. Hal was tall and powerful for his age, but
Grindle was enough taller so that he could look straight over
Hal’s head. He was heavier and more solidly set. Long years
of sea life had put muscles that bulged like sausages under
the skin of his arms and back of his shoulder-blades. His
hands were as big as meat-hooks. ‘Come on, Gent!’
demanded Grindle. ‘Cat or hands?’ ‘Hands,’ said Hal and
closed with his opponent. At once he felt the hands that he
had invited locked round his own throat. Hal ducked and
plunged his head into the big fellow’s stomach. Grindle let
out a grunt of surprise and relaxed his grip just enough so
that Hal could tear loose. Hal backed off a few feet.

‘Hah!’ exclaimed Grindle. ‘Running away already!’ He came

fast, his big gorilla-like hands outstretched. Hal let him
come. He even helped him to come. He seized one of the
hands and pulled, twisting to the right at the same time. The
captain went over Hal’s shoulder, turned a somersault, and
came down on his back on the deck. The breath was
knocked out of him, and some of the conceit too.

Hal had not visited Japan in vain. While there, his Japanese
friends had taught him some of the moves of judo (ju-jitsu).
The principle of judo is to let your opponent destroy himself.
You conquer by yielding. If he plunges at you you let him
come, but step out of the way at the last moment and let
him plunge into the fill. If he comes running you may trip
him and give him a bad fall. His own speed is his undoing. If
he swings a fist at you you may seize him by the wrist and
increase his swing so that he throws his shoulder out of joint.
If he exerts a nerve or muscle you may increase the strain to
the danger-point by striking that nerve or muscle. At such a
moment of strain, a slight tap on a sensitive spot may have
a crippling effect. The judo-fighter is taught the location of
these sensitive spots; for example the elbow, or funny bone,
where a nerve is partially exposed, the armpit, the ankle, the
wrist-bones, the liver, a tendon below the ear, the nerves of
the upper arm, and the Adam’s apple.

In judo the man with the big muscles may be beaten by the
man with the quick brain. Hal was no expert in judo, but he
knew more about it than his opponent. He might not be as
strong as the captain, but he was wiry, swift, and intelligent.
If Grindle was a lion, Hal was a panther.

The captain never knew where to find him. He lowered his

head and charged like a bull, hoping to strike Hal in the
solar plexus - he found himself butting the capstan instead.
He shot his great fist towards Hal’s face, but Hal moved his
head to one side and the fist caught Bruiser an ugly crack
on the jaw.

‘Look out what you’re doing,’ growled Bruiser.

The men were laughing. The captain got the painful

impression that he was making a fool of himself. Was he
going to be beaten by this gent? Not if he knew it. He would
bash the fellow’s head in. He seized a belaying-pin. ‘Not
fair,’ yelled the crowd. ‘Hands only.’ Grindle swung the
heavy club, but at the moment when it should have made
contact with Hal’s head he felt a sharp rap on his wrist that
spoiled his grip and the weapon went overboard.

With a savage curse he pulled a knife from his belt. His crew
booed him but he paid them no heed. He rushed at Hal, who
retreated swiftly until he backed up against one of the try-
pots. Grindle came on at a dead run. At the last moment Hal
ducked, seized one of the captain’s ankles and heaved.
Grindle was lifted in the air and came down head-first into
the pot.

Luckily for him the blubber was not boiling. The try-pots had
been neglected when the big whale came in and the fire had
burned low. The contents of the pot were like a rank-smelling
jelly or paste, and when the captain’s head finally popped
up out of the mess it was completely covered with half-solid
blubber. The men rocked with laughter.

The captain rubbed blubber from his eyes and spat blubber
from his mouth. ‘Get me out of here!’ he screamed.

Hal and Bruiser pulled him out and he collapsed on the deck
in a puddle of grease. He still held his knife, but all the fight
had gone out of him.

He stood up, dripping blobs of fat. He wobbled aft to his

cabin and left a river of blubber behind him.

After he had stripped, cleaned himself as well as he could

and put on fresh clothes, he sat down heavily to think things
over. Before him on his desk was his open log-book. His eyes
fell on the entry:

On this day, Seaman Hal Hunt, guilty of defying established

authority, received eighty lashes.

He crossed it out.
Chapter 19

Grindle shakes hands

Grindle took up his revolver.

He balanced it on the palm of his hand. This gun was his

only friend. It felt good. Courage flowed from it up his arm
and into his chest.

Much of the conceit had been cooked out of him by his

plunge into the pot of whale grease. The gun made him feel
better. He was still master, so long as he possessed the only
firearm on the ship.

He could hear them still laughing on deck. His friend, the

gun, would stop that. A gun has no sense of humour.

‘I’ll show them,’ he muttered.

His anger grew as he looked at the spoiled page of his log.

What would the ship’s owners think when they read this
page? A man was logged as dead, but wasn’t dead. The
same man got eighty lashes, but didn’t. What kind of
nonsense was this? The owners would think the captain a
fool for writing such things and then crossing them out.
Didn’t he know his own mind?

He knew what he was going to do now, but he wouldn’t write

it down this time until it was done. As soon as he felt a little
less wobbly he was going to go on deck with this gun and fill
the Gent’s carcass with bullets. Then he would write in his
log that he had been compelled to use the gun in self-
defence against an unruly seaman who had tried to murder
him.

He thought this over. He began to see that it would not work.

The crew was against him. If he shot Hunt they would report
it to the police as soon as the ship reached port.

A sly grin came over his bristly face.

I’ve got it, he thought. Ill fool ‘em. Make ‘em think it’s all
right between me and the Gent. Pretend we let bygones be
bygones. No hard feelings. We had a fight and it’s all over
and now we’re as friendly as two kittens in a basket. And
after I get them thinking that way they won’t blame me
when the Gent has an accident.

He settled back happily into his chair. A real bad accident.

I’ll fix it for him so he won’t come out of it alive. But
nobody’ll be able to pin anything on me.

He got up and tried his legs. They still felt like two ribbons of
spaghetti. His back was bruised where it had thumped the
deck, his solar plexus ached where Hal had dived into it, and
his head was battered where he had bashed it against the
capstan.

He looked in the mirror. His skin had been blistered here and
there by the hot blubber. He could be thankful it had not
been hotter. But he was not thankful -only possessed by a
terrible hate and passion for revenge.

To think that a nineteen-year-old boy had done all this to

him! Wrathfully he blew his nose; blubber filled his
handkerchief. He wiped the last traces of blubber from the
corners of his eyes, and dug blubber out of his ears. Despite
all his cleaning, he still smelled like a dead whale.
He went up on deck. The fires had been built up again and
the blubber in the try-pots was boiling. The black smoke
rising from the whale-scraps that were fed into the fire, and
the white steam rising from the try-pots swirled and
swooped through the rigging like great black and white
birds. Men dumped chunks of blubber into the pots and
other men drew off the oil into barrels. At the same time men
out on the cutting-stage were beginning to peel off the hide
of Hal’s great whale. Everyone was in great good humour,
still laughing at what had happened to the captain.

‘There he is!’ someone warned, and they all quit work to see
what would happen. ‘He’ll be hopping mad,’ said one. ‘He’ll
probably shoot the place up,’ said another, and looked for
something to hide behind.

‘He’ll kill Hunt,’ said someone else. ‘I’d hate to be in Hunt’s

shoes now.’

Another said: ‘If he lays a hand on Hunt, we’ll finish him.’

But the captain did not pull his gun and he did not seem to
be in a rage. In fact there was something almost like a smile
behind the porcupine bristles. ‘Hunt,’ he called. ‘I have
something to say to you.’ Hal stepped forward. He was as
wary as a cat, and ready to move fast if the captain drew his
gun. But Grindle only stretched out his hand.

‘Put it there,’ he said. ‘Let’s shake hands and forget it.

Nobody can say I ain’t a good sport. It was a fair fight and
you beat me and that’s that. Shake.’

Hal did not remind the captain that it was not a fair fight
Instead of fighting hand to hand as agreed, Grindle had
taken up a belaying-pin and then a knife. No good
sport would do that. But Hal was so grateful for Grindle’s
change of heart that he impulsively shook the hand of the
captain of the Killer.

‘It’s very handsome of you to feel that way about it,’ Hal
said. ‘I was afraid you might be sore.’

‘Me sore!’ Grindle laughed. ‘Boy, you don’t know me. Sore?
On the contrary, it’s a pleasure to find I’ve a real man on my
ship. To show you how I feel about you, I’m going to promote
you. From now on you’re master harpooner.’

‘But I’ve never thrown a harpoon,’ Hal protested.

‘Listen, boy,’ said the captain, thrusting his evil-smelling

bristles among which bits of blubber still remained close to
Hal’s face, ‘anybody who can throw me can throw a
harpoon.’ He laughed loudly at his own joke. ‘Yes sir, you’re
a harpooner from now on. Shake again! ‘

Hal shook again, but a little uncomfortably. He had the

slightest suspicion that the captain was putting on an act.
But he brushed it aside, for he was always inclined to
believe the best about others and perhaps even the brutal
Grindle had a good streak in him.

During the next few days the captain was persistently kind
to Hal. This was not easy. Inside the captain’s barrel chest
was a churning rage and it was hard to turn this into smiles
and pretty talk. The rage had to get out somehow, so he
vented it upon other members of the crew. He counted them
all as his enemies, for they had laughed at him.
Chapter 20

The mako shark

One whose laugh especially stuck in his memory because
his cackle was high and shrill was Sails, who looked after the
ship’s canvas.

Sails had always been a thorn in his flesh. He was older than
the captain and sometimes failed to conceal the fact that he
had more sense. Having been at sea most of his sixty years
he was weather-beaten and wise and did not hesitate to
differ with his chief.

A split developed in the mainsail and the captain ordered

Sails to patch it up. ‘No, no,’ said Sails. ‘It would only break
again.’ ‘I say patch it up.’

‘And I say not,’ retorted Sails testily. ‘That sail is old and
rotten. It’s done its duty. I’ll chuck it away and put in a new
sail.’

‘You’ll do as I tell you,’ thundered Grindle. ‘Sailcloth costs

money. We’ll have no new sail while the old one can be
patched.’

‘But it will only bust -‘

‘If it busts, I’ll bust you - so I will by the Holy Harry!

I know you, you old fossil. You’ll fix it so it will break and

then you can say “I told you so”. Well, I’ll tell you something.
If that sail breaks, you’ll take a ride.’
To ‘take a ride’ was to be tied to the end of a line like a
bundle of dirty clothes, heaved overboard, and dragged
behind the ship.

‘You can’t scare me,’ snapped Sails. But he said no more, for
he knew the captain was quite capable of carrying out his
threat. Muttering, he set to work on the sail, applying the
patch with all the skill of long experience. He didn’t want to
‘take a ride’. At last he was satisfied that he could do no
more. The patch was strong and was stoutly stitched to the
canvas; but the canvas itself was thin and brittle.

‘It ain’t no use,’ he said to himself regretfully. ‘It will break.’

And so it did. The patched sail had not been up for an hour
before a sudden burst of wind split it along the line of the
stitching. It broke with a sound like a pistol shot. The captain
came running. He found Sails mournfully regarding the
whipping rage of canvas.

T told you it would bust,’ he said.

‘Yes, you told me,’ sneered the captain. ‘Then you made sure
it would do just what you said. All right, I warned you. I told
you what I’d do, and I’ll do it. Bruiser! The dragline!’

Angrily Sails turned upon the captain. ‘You dare to lay a

hand on me and you’ll be in irons before the day is over.’

The captain’s face burned red. ‘You dare to threaten me?

You’ll feel different about it after you’ve had a bath. Bruiser!’

Bruiser hesitated. ‘He’s not as young as he used to be,’ he

said. ‘I don’t know that he could stand it’

‘Who asked you for advice?’ stormed the captain. ‘Get a

bowline on him.’
‘It could be murder, sir,’ objected Bruiser. ‘I want no part of
it.’

‘Whose murder?’ retorted the captain, drawing his gun.

‘Perhaps it will be yours if you don’t carry out my orders.
Now will you tie that line?’

Bruiser looked coolly into the barrel of the captain’s revolver.

‘No sir, I won’t.’

The men had gathered solidly around Bruiser; The captain’s

angry eyes surveyed them. They said nothing, but he didn’t
like the way they looked at him. He realized that there was
not a man among them who would put a dragline on the old
sailmaker.

He seized Sails by the arm and walked him to the aft rail.
Deftly he fitted the loop under Sails’ shoulders. The proud
old sailmaker did not struggle or cry out. The men were
coming aft.

‘Stop where you are,’ commanded the captain. ‘I’ll shoot the
man who takes another step.’

The men stood still, growling, irresolute. Before they could

decide what to do the captain stooped, threw his arm round
Sails’ legs, and heaved him over the rail. There was a dull
splash as the sailmaker, still silent, dropped into the sea.

Like so many of the older seamen Sails could not swim. His
body at once sank out of sight. The line ran out fifty, sixty,
seventy feet and then snapped taut on the bitts.

The drag on the line yanked Sails to the surface and fee was
hauled along through the wave-tops at a speed of about four
knots. He choked and gasped for air but did
not cry for help. The captain watched him with grim
satisfaction.

‘That will teach the stubborn old fool.’

The men anxiously watched the sea for sharks and killer-
whales. There was no sign of the two-foot triangle of a
shark’s fin, nor the man-high fin of the killer. But just when
they began to believe that this part of the sea was free of
dangerous fish the surface exploded close to the
unfortunate man and up went something blue and white like
a fountain, on up twenty feet high, then turned and dived
into the sea.

‘Mako!’ yelled the mate, and the men made a rush to the
after rail in defiance of the captain’s gun. They seized the
line and began to haul it in.

There are sharks and sharks. Many of them are quite

harmless. People who have gone in swimming among
harmless sharks without being attacked may foolishly
believe that all sharks are harmless.

But there are three kinds that are man-eaters. They are the
mako, the white shark, and the tiger-shark.

The white shark is the largest, reaching a length of forty

feet. The tiger-shark is the smallest, about twelve feet long.
The mako is the worst and best of the three.

The best because of bis blue and white beauty, his amazing
speed because he is the swiftest of all fishes, and his
spectacular habit of leaping twenty feet into the air (twice
as high as the tarpon).

The worst because of his enormous, razor-edged teeth and

his utterly savage nature. He is afraid of nothing, always
hungry, and always spoiling for a fight.

Twice more the man-eater soared into the sky. He seemed to

be playing with his victim as a cat plays with the mouse that
it intends to devour. If he would only continue playing for a
few moments the man could be hauled to safety.

The thousand-pound fish went up as if he were as light as a

balloon. He was as big round as a barrel, and as long as
three men laid end to end. Each time he came down he
dived into the water a little closer to Sails. The sailmaker
uttered no cry and now could not, for the battering waves
had shut off his breathing and he was unconscious.

‘Pull boys, pull!’ yelled Durkins. ‘Break your backs!’

A few more pulls and the man would be safe. Now he was
actually being lifted out of the water.

But the wily fish knew when to stop playing. Again it leaped,
so high that the men had to look up to see it. Gracefully it
turned in the air and headed downward. Its great jaws
opened. Its huge teeth flashed like ivory in the sun. The jaws
closed upon Sails. The line snapped. The shark, with its
victim in its teeth, dived deep and was seen no more.
Chapter 21

Mutiny
The men hauled in the line and looked at the broken end.

Then they turned upon the captain. They were no longer

afraid of his gun.

Grindle tried to back away. His face was an ashen grey

behind the black bristles. His eyes which usually bulged in
anger now bulged with fear. He waved his revolver.

‘I’ll blast you if you come closer! Get forward, every man of
you. It’s an order.’

‘You’ll give no more orders,’ said the mate. ‘I’m taking your
place as master of this ship.’

‘That’s mutiny,’ shouted Grindle.

‘It’s mutiny,’ agreed Durkins, and took another step forward.

‘Get back. I’m warning you. I’ll report you. I’ll have you all
hanged.’

‘Go ahead and report. And suppose we report what you’ve

just done. Murder, that’s what it was.’

‘Murder, nothing! Just discipline. He had to be taught a

lesson.’

‘It was murder. You knew Sails couldn’t swim. You knew he
was too old for that sort of treatment.. You knew there were
sharks about. You threw him out to drown or be killed by
sharks. That’s the last brute trick you’ll ever pull.’ ‘Mutiny!’
again cried Grindle. ‘Sure! But any court will say we done
right - to arrest a killer. You’re under arrest, Grindle.’ Hie
crowd roared its approval.

‘Grab him!’

‘Clap him in irons!’

‘Throw him to the sharks!’

‘Tear him apart!’

‘Boil him in oil!’

‘Give him eighty lashes!’

Every man had some punishment to suggest, each worse

than the last.

The captain could not retreat farther; his back was against
the rail. Desperately he looked about for a way of escape.
His eye caught sight of a vessel on the horizon.

A plan formed swiftly in his mind. He would leap into the sea
and pretend to drown. After the Killer had gone he would
come to the surface. The ship was coming this way. He was a
good swimmer and could last out until it picked him up.

But first he must get these hounds back so they would not
catch him as he went over the rail.

‘Stand back!’ he roared. I’ll count three. If you’re not out of

the way by that time, I’ll fire.’

He counted three. The men kept closing in.

Grindle fired. Bruiser went through the rest of his life with
one ear. Grindle fired again. The bullet lodged in the mate’s
arm. Once more Grindle pulled the trigger. Nothing came
from the gun but a futile click.

He hurled the gun with all his might. It caught Jimson a

stunning blow on the forehead. Grindle tried to leap the rail,
but hands, many hands, were already upon him. He
struggled and bit like a wildcat.

Soon he was held so tightly that he could not move a

muscle. He could still roar, and roar he did while they
dragged him forward and pushed him into the brig.

The door clanged shut and the key turned in the lock. He
gripped the bars and looked out between them, raging and
roaring like a captured gorilla.

The brig was a miniature jail. Many a ship had a brig, but
surely there was no other quite like this one. It looked like a
cage intended for a wild animal.

Grindle himself had had it built and had made it as

uncomfortable as possible, so that the prisoner would repent
of his sins. There were no solid walls, only iron bars all round,
and iron bars above. A man could not stand up in it, since it
was just four feet high. He must crouch like an animal, or sit.

There was no protection against the weather. The scalding

tropical sun beat down upon the inmate during the heat of
the day. Cold night winds chilled him and sudden storms
soaked every rag on his body.

There was a bunk, but it afforded no rest. The malicious

Grindle had ordered that it be made only four feet long. A
man could not stretch out on it but must lie humped up in a
ball. The men in the fo’c’sle might complain of the boards on
which they lay but the prisoner in the brig fared worse.
Instead of boards set close together, the bunk was made of
slats with three inches between slats. To lie on these slats for
an hour was torture, to lie there all night was impossible.

There were no blankets. No food was allowed, except bread

and water served once a day.

Grindle had always been extremely proud of Ms brig. He had

enjoyed standing on the outside and looking in at the
unlucky prisoner. Now he was on the inside, looking out For
some reason this did not give him as much pleasure.

‘I’ll have you all hanged, hanged, hanged!’ he screamed

through the bars. ‘See that ship coming? The captain is a
friend of mine. He’ll come aboard and see what you’ve done.
Mark my words, I’ll be out of this thing in an hour. Then I’ll
have every blasted one of you logged for mutiny.’

Some of the men half believed him. Nervously, they watched

the oncoming ship. Grindle saw that he had them scared. He
followed up his advantage.

TB give you one more chance,’ he said. ‘Let me out and I’ll
promise to say nothing about this business. It’ll be as if it
hadn’t happened.’ The men turned to the mate, Durkins, for
advice. ‘Do you think we ought to turn him loose?’ said one.
I’m not hankerin’ to be hanged.’

‘Don’ let him fool you,’ said Durkins. ‘He don’t know the
captain of that ship from Adam. Besides, they ain’t comin’ to
gam with us. See, they’ve already changed course.’

Sure enough, the motor vessel had turned and was now
sailing parallel with the Killer, still about three miles off.
Durkins studied it through binoculars. ‘It’s a catcher,’ he
said.

‘What’s a catcher?’ It was Roger who asked the question,

and Mr Scott who answered.

‘A ship sent out to catch whales,’ he said. ‘We do it the old

way - they do it the modern way. They kill the whale with a
harpoon fired from a cannon. Then they tow it to the factory
ship.’

‘Factory ship?’

‘Yes. You can see it - away beyond - just on the horizon.’

Where sea and sky met Roger could make out not one but a
number of ships. One was very large, the others much
smaller.

‘The small ones are catchers, just like this one,’ said Scott.
‘The big one is the factory ship.’

‘Why do they call it a factory ship?’

‘Because it’s equipped with all kinds of machinery to turn

whales into oil. It takes us all day, sometimes two or three
days, to process one whale. A factory ship can put through
four dozen whales a day. A large factory ship can keep a
fleet of eight or ten catchers busy, combing the seas in
search of whales.’

Hal, too, was listening and was as interested as his younger

brother.

‘It would be great if we could get aboard a factory ship or

catcher,’ he said, ‘and see how the new way compares with
the old.’
‘Perhaps with good luck, you will,’ said Scott.

Hal was to remember that remark. ‘With good luck,’ Scott

had said. It was to be bad luck, not good, that would
introduce the boys to modern whaling.
Chapter 22

Escape - almost
Night closed in over the ship of the mutineers.

The breeze held steady, the sails needed no trimming, the

men were idle. Down in the fo’c’sle they ate and talked over
the events of the day.

On deck all was quiet. The helmsman dozed over the wheel.
The caged captain tried the four-foot bed of slats that he
had designed for the discomfort of his men. He gave it up
and lay on the deck. The deck was wet with spray, and cold.
His dinner had been bread and water.

Grindle was sorry for himself. It did not occur to him to be

sorry for all the others he had put into this wretched little
prison.

Outside of the brig stood a guard. This was the seaman Brad.

Brad spent half his time watching his prisoner and half
regarding the lights of the catcher that had stopped sailing
for the night and lay hove to a few miles off.

‘Brad,’ whispered the captain hoarsely.

Brad came close to the bars,

‘Listen,’ Grindle whispered, ‘how about getting me out of

here?’

‘Me, get you out? Shut up and go to sleep.’

‘It would be worth your while.’

‘Why?’

‘It would save your neck.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Heavens, man, don’t you know what happens to mutineers?

Every man will be hanged by the neck until dead. All except
you. If you stick with me I’ll see that you get off scot free.
Besides, there’ll be some cash in it for you. Say two hundred
pounds. How does that sound?’

‘It sounds crazy,’ said Brad. ‘Suppose I let you out of there -
what would they do to me? They’d slaughter me.’

‘They won’t have a chance. We’ll be off the ship and away

before they know what’s going on. We’ll slip the dory into
the water and row over to that catcher.’

‘Mmm,’ hesitated Brad. T dunno. I’ll have to think it over.’

‘You haven’t time to think it over,’ urgently whispered

Grindle. ‘We’ll be leaving the catcher astern. You gotta act
now, or never. Never mind thinking it over. Just think of your
neck.’

Brad felt a noose tightening round his throat. Yes, anything

was better than that.

‘I’ll get the key,’ he said.

He slipped aft and down the companion to the supply-room.

At the other end of the ship Roger looked over the edge of
his bunk. Hal in the bunk below was fast asleep. The other
men had turned in. Only one sputtering, smoking whale-oil
lamp had been left burning. Dark shadows crept about the
room.

Roger had something on his mind. He would have liked to

talk to his brother about it, but didn’t want to wake him.
Probably everything was all right. But he couldn’t help
wondering about Brad.

Brad had been posted to guard the brig. Roger had reason to
distrust Brad. Brad was the one who had been detailed to
hold the lifeline when Roger had spent the night on the
dead whale, fighting off the sharks. Brad had gone to sleep
on the job. It was no thanks to him that Roger had come out
of that night alive. Could such a man be depended upon to
guard the brig?

‘It’s none of my business,’ said Roger to himself. The mate

had picked Brad, and what the mate did was usually right.
Roger turned over and tried to go to sleep. He found himself
more awake than ever. Tt won’t hurt just to take a look.’ He
slid down from his bunk, pulled on his trousers, and, without
bothering to put on his sea-boots, slipped quietly up the
companion to the deck.

Hiding behind anything that came handy, the galley, the

capstan, the masts, Roger crept close to the brig.

He could make out a black shadow. That must be Brad. He

could hear a slight scraping sound as of metal against metal.
A key was being slowly turned in the lock. Then the barred
door of the brig was being opened very gradually so that it
might not squeak. Another shadow appeared. That must be
the captain.

What should Roger do? He must slip back and rouse the
mate.
He left his hiding-place, but before he could gain another he
found himself gripped firmly from behind and a great hand
clapped over his mouth.

my fine lad,’ it was Grindle’s hoarse whisper,

‘you’d spy on us, would you?’

Brad was already regretting what he had done. ‘I told you it

wasn’t safe. We’ll have the whole pack of them on us in a
minute. You better get back in the brig.’

‘Don’t lose your nerve,’ retorted the captain. ‘As for this
young sneak, he won’t trouble us long. Ill hold him while you
slip your knife into him. A little higher - just, over the heart.
That will do it.’

Roger felt the prick of the steel point on his bare chest.

‘Wait a minute,’ said Grindle. T have a better idea. He can

help row us to the catcher. Keep your knife out. If he hollers,
let him have it. Now listen, young fella. I’m going to take my
hand off your mouth. If you make a squawk, it’ll be your last.
Got that clear?’

Roger managed to nod his head.

The hand over his mouth fell away. Grindle pushed him
towards the dory. Brad kept close, the point of his knife
tickling Roger’s back.

‘Mind you move quiet,’ ordered Grindle. ‘And keep outa

sight o’ the wheel.’

The dory hung from the davits. It was a light cedar craft, half
the size of a whaleboat. The two men and the boy climbed
aboard. The falls were released and the boat was eased
down slowly and noiselessly to the sea.

The surface was smooth. The wind had dropped and the ship
was barely moving. The boat did not slap and bump - all was
quiet, and Grindle could congratulate himself on a perfect
getaway.

‘Cast off!’ he whispered.

The boat floated free. Roger stooped to find the oars. His
hand touched the plug.

Each of the ship’s boats had a hole in the bottom. It was a

round hole about two inches in diameter. It was not meant to
let water in, it was there to let water out. The hole was filled
by a round wooden plug, like a large cork. When water
washed into the boat it was bailed out, but it was impossible
to get rid of all of it in this way. So when the boat returned to
the ship and was hauled up to the davits the plug was
removed from the hole to allow the rest of the water to drain
out. Then the plug was replaced.

Roger pretended to be still groping for the oars. His fingers

were working to loosen the plug. Finally with a twist and a
pull he got it out of the hole and slipped it into his pocket.
Then he unshipped his oats and prepared to row.

Water was boiling up into the boat. Roger could already feel
it up to his ankles.

‘What the Holy Harry!’ came Grindle’s harsh whisper.

‘Where’s the water coming from? Those all-fired deck-hands
musta forgot to put in the plug. Find it, quick!’

He and Brad searched the boat’s bottom for the missing

plug. Roger seized a leather bucket and pretended to bail.
The boat was now half full.

Scrambling about between the thwarts the men could not

avoid making considerable noise. They bumped into oars
and gear. Roger could hear running feet on the ship’s deck,
then the voice of the helmsman rousing the mate.

The boat was now completely awash. Slowly it rolled over

and its occupants were spilled into the sea. They clung to
the overturned boat. Grindle obstinately remained silent,
but Brad began to yell.

‘Help! Help! Help!’

The ship was slowly passing. Soon they would be left behind
in the great silent waste of waters. Brad yelled again.

There was a commotion on deck. Men were running,

shouting. A whaleboat hit the water.

‘Where away?’ came a voice.

‘Over here,’ screamed Brad.

Grindle proudly held his tongue. He held it until he felt a

nudging against his leg. A shark? All at once his pride left
him and he yelled bloody murder. He kicked and splashed
and bellowed. He seemed to go crazy with fear.

Roger watched him with a sly grin. For it was Roger, not a
shark, that had nudged him. Again Roger gave him a poke.
Again the big bully exploded with terror. Grindle would have
been very happy at that moment to be back in his safe little
jail.

He began to sob and wail like an oversized baby. His

behaviour showed Roger once and for all that a ‘tough guy’s‘
bold front may have nothing but jelly behind it. He was
seeing Grindle in his true colours - several shades of yellow.

The whaleboat came alongside and the three were hauled

aboard. The dory was taken in tow and the whaleboat
started back to the ship.

‘Who was doing all that blubbering?’ asked the mate.

Tt was the kid,’ said Grindle. ‘Scared out of his wits.’

Roger opened his mouth to speak, but decided to say

nothing.

Grindle was tempted to make a bigger story out of it.

‘We were attacked by sharks,’ he said. ‘Must have been a

dozen of them. I beat them off with my bare fists. Punched
them right in the nose. That’s a shark’s most sensitive point
you know - the nose. Lucky for these fellows that they had
me along.’

The mate was not fooled. ‘Sounds too good to be true,’ he

said sarcastically. Back on deck, Grindle was marched to his
cage. ‘Now you’re not going to put me back in there,’
complained Grindle. ‘Not after me savin’ the lives of two
men!’

‘Not only you,’ said the mate, ‘but Brad also.’ He turned to
Roger. ‘And I’m afraid we’ll have to lock you up too.’

‘What for?’

‘For desertion. And for helping a prisoner to escape. I never

would have thought it of you, kid.’ ‘Will you let me tell you
just what happened?’ ‘Yes, but you’d better make it good.’ ‘I
saw Brad unlock the brig and let the Captain out. I started to
get you, but they grabbed me. They made me help row the
boat. I pulled out the plug so the boat filled with water.’

Grindle laughed. ‘The young rascal - he’s just trying to save

his own skin. Now you’d better let me tell you the truth. The
kid was in it with us from the start. He sneaked down and
got the key and let me out.’

‘Then what did he do with the key?’ demanded the mate. ‘I

don’t know - put it in his pocket, I suppose.’ ‘Search them,’
the mate said to Jimson. Before Jimson could move to do so,
Brad was seen to draw something from his pocket and throw
it away. He had meant to cast it into the sea, but it struck
the rail and bounced back on deck. The mate picked it up. It
was the key to the brig.

‘Now we have a pretty good idea who unlocked the brig,’ the
mate said to Roger. ‘But that still doesn’t prove that you
weren’t in league with them. How can you prove that you
tried to stop them by pulling out the plug?’

‘He can’t,’ snorted Grindle. ‘I can tell you all about that plug.
I forgot - now I remember. Yesterday I took it out of the boat
myself. I put it down in my cabin.’

‘Why did you take it out?’

T had good reason. Some of the men were getting unruly. I

suspected some o’ them might grab the boat and try to
desert. So I hid the plug. Makes sense, don’t it?’

‘It makes sense,’ admitted the mate and turned again to

Roger. ‘You’re in a tough spot, chum. You claim you were
loyal to us - that you pulled out the plug so these fellows
couldn’t get away. The captain says he removed it himself
and took it below, then forgot about it. Do we have to search
his cabin to find out which of you is telling a straight story?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Roger said. He drew the plug from his
trouser pocket and put it in the mate” hand.

Grindle’s eyes bulged with surprise. The men cheered. They

liked the boy and were happy that he had been able to clear
himself. The mate clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Good for
you, my lad!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re no lad, you’re as good a
man as any on this ship. If it hadn’t been for you these scum
woulda got clean away. Say, we had lemon pie in the
officer’s mess tonight. Go to the galley and cut yourself a big
piece of it. Tell the cook I sent you. And as for^you two,’ fie
said to Grindle and Brad, ‘since you’re so fond of each
other’s company you’ll have plenty of time to enjoy it. Get in
there, both of you.’ He pushed them into the brig and locked
the door.

This time a more reliable man, the big harpooner Jim-son,

was placed on guard.
Chapter 23

Can a whale sink a ship?

‘Blows! Whale on the lee bow!’ shouted the foremast lookout
late in the afternoon of the next day.

‘Blows! Three points off weather-bow!’ came from the

lookout on the mainmast.

‘Another to leeward!’ yelled the first.

‘Two straight ahead!’ announced the second.

‘Whales! A dozen of ‘em! Ganging up on us!’

‘Whales! Whales! Whales!’

The mate scrambled up the mainmast to the rings. An

amazing spectacle lay before him. Ahead and on both sides
silver fountains leaped into the sky. At least a dozen whales
were sporting in the waves.

They did not behave like the usual school or pod of whales.
This was no family group, quiet and dignified. The height of
their spouts showed they were all full-grown monsters, and
probably all males.

They flung themselves out of the sea. They soared up like

black meteors. They arched above the waves like curved
bridges. They threw their enormous tails into the air and
brought them down with a gigantic slap. It was one big wild
party.
They seemed to have noticed the ship and were closing in
on it - ganging up on it, as the lookout had said. ‘Bulls on a
rampage!’ muttered the mate. ‘I only hope they leave us
alone.’

Mr Scott on deck was watching the whales through

binoculars. Hal and Roger stood beside him. ‘What do you
make of it?’ Hal asked. ‘Bachelors out on a binge,’ said Scott.
‘Whales are like men. Sometimes they leave the ladies and
children and go off and raise Cain. The ringleaders may be
young bulls that have no families or old bulls who have lost
theirs. Sometimes the leaders are ones that have been
injured by harpoons or lances, and their suffering makes
them wild and dangerous. Usually an old or wounded bull
will go off by himself. When they gang up this way it’s bad.
Just like men. One teddy-boy or hoodlum may lack nerve,
but get a dozen of them together and they’ll try anything.’
‘Why doesn’t the mate order the boats lowered?’ ‘It’s too
late. The sun has set and it will be dark in fifteen minutes. It
would be risky enough by daylight to run a boat into that
pack of rowdies; at night it would be suicide. You’ll have to
wait until morning.’ ‘We’ll leave them far behind before
morning.’ ‘I doubt it. They’re coming closer. They seem to be
taking a lot of interest in the ship. Chances are they’ll go
right along with us. It won’t be too pleasant.’

‘Why not?’ Roger asked. ‘I think it will be fun to see them

playing around.’

Scott smiled and shook his head. ‘They may play rough.’

‘But we’re safe enough,’ said Roger. ‘They couldn’t do

anything to the ship.’

‘I hope not,’ said Scott doubtfully.

When it was too dark to see more the mate and the lookouts
came down from the rings. Mate Durkins and his men stood
by the rail, listening.

The whales were now all about the ship. Their spouts
whooshed up like rockets.

‘Keep out of the way of those spouts,’ the mate warned.

‘You’ll get gassed.’

Hal had already learned this lesson. Most of the men

prudently retreated when a whale came too close. One man
whose curiosity got the better of him looked down on a
whale’s head just as the column of gas and steam rose into
his face. He was half blinded and went to his bunk with
medicated compresses over his eyes.

The whales were a talkative lot. As they dipped, swooped,

and slid about, they grunted like rhinoceroses, squealed like
elephants, and bellowed like bulls. Hal remembered the
groans of the suffering whale that had carried him so far
across the sea. But he had not imagined that the monsters
could make so many different sounds.

Evidently they were highly excited. They were having fun

with the ship. Perhaps they instinctively knew that they
were terrifying the humans on board.

They dived beneath the vessel on one side and came up on

the other. One shot up so high that his great box of a head
was above the deck. His skull was twice as big as the crate
that is used to pack a grand piano. He dropped again into
the sea with a thundering splash that sent a shower of spray
over, the men on deck.

One took to butting the rudder. The wheel was jerked out of
the helmsman’s hands and went spinning. Luckily the
playful beast desisted from this game before completely
wrecking the steering-gear of the ship. There was a crackle
and crash up forward. ‘There goes the bowsprit,’ exclaimed
the mate. He went to investigate. The bowsprit was gone,
probably swept away by one flirt of a big bull’s tail. The
flying jib, the jib, and the staysail, previously made fast to
the bowsprit, hung in rags.

A monster coming up from beneath lifted the ship a good

three feet, then let it drop. The masts shivered and cracked,
the sails shook, men sat down hard on the deck, and there
was a great clatter in the galley as all the pans on the walls
tumbled down on the surprised cook.

‘If this is their idea of fun,’ said the mate, T only hope they
don’t get serious. Last year a whale gave us a crack that
stove in two strakes. Luckily we were near land, but the bark
was half full of water before we made port.’

‘But a whale can’t actually sink a ship, can it?’ asked Roger.

‘Not only can, but does. There was the Essex. She was struck
by a big sperm just forward of the fore-chains. It busted her
wide open and the pump couldn’t save her.

The crew had only ten minutes to abandon ship. They got
away in three boats. One boat was lost. One got to Chile.
One landed on an uninhabited island where the men
managed to live on bird’s eggs until they were picked up
five months later.’

‘What an experience!’ Hal said.

‘Oh, there’ve been lots of others like it. A whale hit a

Peruvian sloop so hard that the men were shaken out of their
hammocks and the captain was thrown out of his cabin.
Everybody thought the ship had struck a rock.
They sounded, but found only deep water. Then the whale
came back to finish the job. This time he cracked open the
hull just above the kelson and sank the ship.

‘And perhaps you’ve heard of the Ann Alexander. A whale

they had lanced attacked the ship just abreast the foremast.
One whack was enough. The men only had time to tumble
into the boats and row clear before the ship went down.’

The mate was rudely interrupted by a whale that thrust its

head out of the wave and said ‘Rrump!’ before sinking back
into the sea. Durkins continued.

‘Then there was the Parker Cook. A mad whale had to hit it
three times before he smashed it. And the Pocahontas. Her
captain was only twenty-eight, and that’s pretty young for a
master, so the crew called him the boy-captain. He was
pretty smart. After a whale stove in his ship, he kept the
pumps going at two hundred and fifty strokes an hour and
set out for the nearest port. It was Rio, seven hundred and
fifty miles away, but the boy-captain made it.’

‘Is it always the sperm that does the damage?’ Roger wanted
to know.

‘Oh no. A finback hulled a hundred-foot craft, the Dennis

Gale, off Eureka, California. And along the same coast in
1950 a large yacht, the Lady Linda, was smashed by a blue
whale.’

‘I suppose,’ Hal said, ‘those were all wooden ships. Could a

whale do anything to a steel hull?’

‘I can tell you something about that,’ Scott said. ‘Not so long
ago a steamer with a steel hull had its plates pushed open
by a huge humpback. The break was through the side of the
vessel at the coal bunkers. The inrush of water put out the
fires and sank the ship in three minutes.’

He paused to smile at the startled look on the boys’

faces, then went on.

‘You’ve heard of the great explorer, Roy Chapman Andrews,

former director of my museum. He made a study of whales,
just as I’m trying to do now. His steamer was nearly sunk by
a big sperm, but it lost its enthusiasm when it ran into the
propeller and the whirling blades ripped the blubber off its
nose.

‘Just to give you an idea of the strength of a whale -Dr

Andrews tells of the big blue they snagged with a heavy
line. That whale dragged the ship forward at six knots, and
all the time the engines were at full speed astern! Altogether
it towed the steamer thirty miles.

‘And he tells of a finback that came at a steamer at high

speed and crushed her side like an eggshell. The crew was
hardly able to get a small boat over before she went down.

‘Of course,’ Scott added, ‘an ocean liner or a freighter is safe

enough. But Dr Andrews reported many cases of whales
sinking ships up to three hundred or four hundred tons.’

Hal’s eye roamed over the Killer. Her tonnage was

considerably under three hundred and there was no steel in

her sides.

‘You’ll be scaring the lads,’ said Durkins. 1 don’t think so,’

said Scott. ‘They don’t scare so easily. Anyhow, I think we’re
in no danger tonight. “These rascals are just playing. You
haven’t hurt them yet. But what do you plan to do tomorrow
morning? If you stick one of these rogues with a harpoon I
think you are in for trouble.’

‘You’re probably right,’ said Durkins. ‘But we’ll have to risk

that. After all, our business is whaling. There’s a lot of oil out
there, and we’ve got to go after it, trouble or no trouble.’
Chapter 24

The wreck of the Killer

No one on board the whaler slept well that night.

It was an all-night party for the rogue whales. They snorted

and squealed like beasts of the jungle. They spouted with a
sound like that of a steamer when it blows its stacks, or a
steam locomotive when it lets off pressure.

The men in the bunks no sooner began to drift off to sleep

than they were roused by the bumping of a mammoth body
against the hull or a curious rubbing sound when a monster
scraped his back across the keel. Now and then the ship
bounced up and down like a wagon going over a rough road.
The ship’s timbers strained and creaked. Boots on the floor
hopped about as if unseen sailors were dancing in them.
Whale-oil lamps swung and shivered in their gimbals.

Roger sat up in Ms bunk with eyes popping when he heard

the rush of a whale coming at tremendous speed towards
the ship. He waited for the smash of the great head against
the timbers.

But the big mischief-maker was just amusing himself.

Instead of crashing head-on into the hull, he must have

raised his head at the last moment and struck the rail a
glancing blow. There was a crackling, splintering sound as
the heavy body smashed the gunwales. Roger heard Hal in
the bunk below mutter:

That was a close one.’

Roger lay down again, plugged both ears with his shirt, and
tried to sleep.

‘All hands on deck!’ came the call at dawn.

Usually this call brought a chorus of groans and mutterings

from sleepy sailors. This time there was none of that. They
could hardly wait to get a crack at their nighttime visitors. In
two minutes every man was on deck. The cook dealt out
coffee and hardtack.

The whales had drawn off about a quarter of a mile from the

ship and were indulging in a sort of gigantic leapfrog,
playfully jumping over each other in great graceful curves.

‘Man the boats!’ ordered the mate. ‘Lower away!’

The ship had been equipped with four whaleboats and a

dory. One whaleboat had already been smashed. The other
three now put down and pulled away from the Killer’s side.

Hal, in the bow of the mate’s boat, was to have his first
experience as a harpooner. Scott with his cameras was in the
second boat, and Roger in the third. The men all pulled
lustily, each crew eager to get there first.

In the excitement of the chase no one worried about the

danger. This was no ordinary whale-hunt. They were about to
break up a party of gangsters, the world’s biggest. So far the
gangsters were only playful, but what would they do when
they felt the cold iron? But just so long as men, women, and
children in far cities wanted the things that whales could
provide, whalers must take chances.

‘We’ll make it!’ cried the mate. ‘Bend your backs. Blister
your hands. Three more pulls!’
His boat was the first to break into the circle of monsters.
Hugging the steering-oar, he directed the boat alongside the
largest bull. ‘All right, Hunt! Hop to it.’

Hal dropped the bow-oar, seized the harpoon, and stood up.
His legs were uncertain under him. His mind was uncertain
too. He wanted to succeed in his new task. But he hated to
kill. He gritted his teeth, poised the harpoon, and waited as
the boat slid up to the monster’s Deck. ‘Now!’ cried Durkins.

As if in a bad dream, Hal felt Ms arm fly forward and the

harpoon leave his hand. The harpoon went in all the way.
‘Couldn’t be better,’ yelled Durkins. ‘Back off!’ As the ship
had trembled when butted during the night, so the great
whale trembled now. His black hide rippled like water from
stem to stern. He seemed to wonder what had struck him.
The men waited anxiously. Perhaps he would set off and tow
the boat on another ‘Nantucket sleigh ride’. Perhaps he
would sound a thousand feet deep and drag the boat after
him.

But the big bull did not try to run away. He angled about so
that his weak eye could see what had bothered him. Then he
came straight for the boat with open jaws. ‘Overboard!’
shouted the mate. The men tumbled into the water. The
whale took the boat bow on. The mouth from front to back
was more than long enough to accommodate a twenty-foot
boat.

The monster was a good ninety feet, and thirty feet of him
was head. Only the sperm among whales has a head one-
third of the length of the body.

So the bow of that boat never tickled his tonsils before he

closed his teeth upon its stern. The men who had leaped into
the water sank a few feet below its surface, and when they
came up again they looked about in amazement.

‘Where’s the boat?’

There was no sign of it - not even a floating oar.

Then the monster tossed up that mighty head, as big and

boxlike as a caravan. He opened his jaws and with a push of
his five-ton tongue threw out fragments and splinters of
what ten seconds before had been a whaleboat

Clinging to these scraps, the men anxiously watched the

huge black bodies milling about them.

They were used to whales that swim away from danger.

These whales did not try to escape. Instead, they seemed
about to attack.

They circled around the floating men, snapping their great

jaws, thrashing the water into foam with their flukes.

The men looked for the other boats. Surely one of them
would come to the rescue.

But they, too, were having trouble. In the third mate’s boat
the big harpooner Jimson had struck home. The harpooned
whale angrily turned upon his enemies, dived, came up
under the boat, and tossed it twenty feet into the air.

For a moment the sky was full of flying arms and legs as the
men who had been spilled out of the boat fell to the sea.
Then the bull savagely smashed the boat with his tail.

He disappeared for a moment, then came rushing back to

crunch the floating wood to bits.
The one remaining boat now drew in to pick up the
survivors. The big bulls, blowing like thunder, kept circling
about, but by great good fortune every man was saved.

With three crews on board the boat was so crowded that any
further attempt to capture a whale was out of the question.
Loaded to within an inch of the water it laboured slowly back
to the ship. The angry whales went along with it. Their
beating flukes sent up showers of spray. Again and again
they dived beneath the boat and the men held their breath,
expecting to be tossed sky high. What a relief when they
were back on deck and the lone whaleboat was swinging
from its davits!

The relief did not last long. The whales, instead of taking
themselves off, now began to threaten the ship.

Boiling with rage they swam round and round, tail-swiped

the hull with resounding whacks, scraped be neath the keel.

‘Square the yards!’ the mate commanded. ‘Let’s get out of

this -fast!’

The sails filled and the ship got under way. For a bark it
made good speed, but not good enough. Its ten knots was
insufficient to shake off enemies who could easily go twenty.

Suddenly there was a smashing sound astern. The wheel

was usually hard to turn - but now it spun idly in the
helmsman’s hands. Third mate Brown ran aft to inspect the
damage.

‘The rudder!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s gone. One of those brutes

has snapped it off.’ Rudderless, the ship fell off course. With
her sails slatting, and yards banging against the masts, she
slowed to a drift, rocking lazily in the waves..
Now she was a sitting duck at the mercy of the bulls of the
sea. It was just a question as to which one would strike the
final blow.

A sperm-whale’s forehead is straight up and down like a cliff.

It is almost as hard and tough as iron. It has been compared
to the inside of a horse’s hoof, so firm that a lance or
harpoon cannot make the slightest dent in it. The eyes and
ears are ten feet or more behind the forehead. They cannot
be injured if the whale decides to use his head as a battering
ram.

So the men went about their work nervously, watching out

of the corners of their eyes as a dozen or more of the great
black foreheads menaced the ship. The carpenter and some
sailors tried to rig a jury-rudder. The mate, well aware of the
danger to the vessel, ordered that the whaleboat should be
stocked with food and water.

Why was the boat not already stocked? Why were not stores
of food and water kept in it at all times, to be ready for any
emergency?

For the simple reason that a whaleboat is a boat to fight

whales. It is not intended for storage. There are no lockers or
cupboards in it. Boxes and crates of supplies would be
seriously in the way, their weight would slow the boat down
and they would be lost whenever the boat capsized.

Even at best, a whaleboat is heavily loaded. It must carry

not only its crew but oars, mast, sail, harpoons and lances,
leather bailing-buckets, wooden tubs for the line, and a half
mile or more of heavy line.

But now if the whaleboat was to be used not for fighting

whales but for escape, the harpoons and lances and tubs of
line must be taken out and provisions put in. The men
assigned to the job hurried to the supply-room and began to
turn up hogsheads of salt pork and tins of hardtack.

They were interrupted by a cry from the deck followed by a

terrific crash and a bursting of timbers. Water thundered
into the supply-room and the men in a panic abandoned
their work and fled to the deck.

It was the great ninety-foot whale harpooned by Hal that

had struck the fatal blow. The men on deck had seen him
coming and there was nothing they could do about it. His
lashing tail made a wake of foam behind him, and the surf
flew up above him like a dozen fountains. His head was half
out of water. His speed was terrific. There was no doubt of
his intentions. Stung by the pain of the harpoon, he was
mad enough to smash his own skull if necessary in order to
destroy this floating enemy.

He struck the ship to windward just abaft the cathead and

stove in her starboard bows. Then he floated free, perhaps a
little stunned by the blow but otherwise unharmed. His
angry left eye was focused upon the ship, and he seemed
quite willing and capable of giving it another crack if
necessary.

It was not necessary. The ship was sinking. Durkins made a

desperate effort to save her.

‘Man the pumps! Carpenter - never mind that rudder! Get

below. See if you can patch the hole.’

He might as well have cried to the moon for help. The

carpenter and his men were not half-way down the
companionway before they were met by a boiling uprush of
sea-water which carried them back to the deck.
The pumps had no effect. The ship was settling by the nose.
The bow was already under water. Men who hoped to
descend into the fo’c’sle to get a few of their belongings
found it full from top to bottom.

The water throbbing into the hull made the ship tremble as
if terrified by the fate awaiting her and appealing to her
crew to save her. And all the time the great bull, with the
iron protruding from his neck, lay by and watched, and one
could imagine a sardonic grin at the corner of his great
mouth.

The masts dipped forward, making their last bow to the

relentless sea. The sails shivered as the waves, the fingers of
the sea, reached for them. The final dive was now only a
matter of moments.

No master, even if he is officially only a second mate, likes to

lose his ship. Durkins felt the agony of his vessel, the
tremble, the shiver, and it was with the same pain in his own
heart that he cried:

‘Abandon ship! Into the boats!’

The men made a rush for the whaleboat and the dory. They
were filled in an instant, and in another instant were lowered
to the sea and cast off.

‘Pull away!’ ordered Durkins. ‘We’ve got to be well off or

we’ll be sucked down when she sinks.’

There was a cry from the deck. Who had been left aboard?
The captain and Brad in the brig. In the rush of events they
had been completely forgotten. They would be drowned like
rats in a trap.

‘Let them sink!’ yelled Bruiser.

‘It’s what they deserve,’ said another.

‘We can’t leave them without a try,’ Durkins said. ‘Jimson,

you have the key to the brig. Go back and get them.’

“Not me,’ said Jimson. ‘They ain’t worth it Besides, there’s no

time. The ship’d go down before I could get them out.’

‘And you’d go down with it,’ admitted Durkins, ‘so I can’t

order you. Is there a volunteer?’

Silence. It seemed that there was no volunteer. Then Hal

spoke up.

‘I’ll go. Give me the key, Jimson.’

‘You’re a fool,’ said Jimson, and gave him the key.

The boat pulled alongside. The ship was so low in the water
that Hal could step from the whaleboat to the deck. He ran
to the brig. It looked even more than usual like a cage for
wild animals, for the men in it were wild with terror.

‘You’d leave us here to drown!’ screamed Captain Grindle.

‘I’ll get you for this.’

The water was already knee-deep on the deck and in the

brig. Hal unlocked the door. Without troubling to thank him,
the released prisoners ran for the gunwale and tumbled into
the boat. Hal followed.

The two boats barely had time to get out of range before the
ship with a deep sighing sound, and a trembling and
shaking from stem to stern, slid head-first into the sea.

It was a slow dive. Sail after sail disappeared. The foremast

was gone. The rings at the head of the mainmast where
Roger had stood as lookout sank beneath the surface. The
mizenmast struggled for a moment to stay up, but the
waves threw their arms about it and pulled it down.

Nothing remained but the stern, standing up like a sore

thumb, rudder posts broken where the rudder had been torn
away, the name of the ship and its home port visible to the
last.

The waves closed in over the painted words, there was a

large lazy whirlpool with a pit in its centre from which came
a breathing sound, the circling stopped, the surface looked
like any other bit of ocean and the sea promptly forgot that
there had ever been a bark Killer of St Helena.
Chapter 25

Adrift
The ocean suddenly seemed very large and empty.

The castaways in the two small boats looked in vain for a sail
or a plume of smoke. The horizon was bare. There was no
sign of the factory ship and its catchers. Even the whales
had disappeared.

Some of the men still stared in fascination at the spot where

the Killer had gone down. It was as if they expected the ship
to rise again before their eyes.

The mate counted heads. There were five men in the dory. It
was meant for one, or at most two. Only twelve feet long, it
was intended merely for use in harbour, by the painter or
the carpenter, or a messenger to shore. Now it lay
dangerously low and water sloshing into it kept the bailers
busy.

Eighteen men filled the whaleboat - it was meant for six. The
men stood, shoulder to shoulder. There was no room to
unship an oar. They waited, bewildered, doing nothing,
knowing nothing they could do.

‘At least we can put up the sail,’ said the mate.

This was done with difficulty. A line was passed to the

dory, and the whaleboat with the dory in tow began to move
sluggishly through the waves.
Captain Grindle was complaining.

‘Get off my toes. Quit crowding. Take your elbows out of my

ribs. Remember, I’m still master. I’m not going to be jammed
in like a common seaman.’

‘Stop squawking,’ said the mate sharply. ‘Don’t forget that if

Hunt hadn’t gone back for you you’d be at the bottom of the
sea right now.’

‘Small thanks to Hunt,’ retorted the captain. ‘He did it just to

be smart. Just to make himself look big and make me look
small. I’m not the man to stand for that I’ll make him suffer
for it.’

The mate stared, speechless. How could a man be so

ungrateful to the one who had saved his life? Hal Hunt had
rescued his worst enemy. The mate was sure he had not
done it to be ‘smart’. He had done it because it was a job
that had to be done. You couldn’t stand by and let a man
drown, even if that was what he deserved. If Grindle were
human, he would appreciate what had been done for him.
He wasn’t human.

‘You’re a rat,’ said the mate. ‘We should have let you go
down with the others.’

‘Don’t be insolent,’ snapped Grindle. ‘I’m not in the brig now.

I’m taking over the command of these boats. I am captain
and you will obey my orders.’

Durkins smiled, but did not answer. Grindle’s anger rose.

‘You think that’s funny. I suppose you think it’s funny that
you lost me my ship. It was your fault. All due to your
carelessness and stupidity. I could have saved her.’
‘Just how?’ asked Durkins.

Grindle evaded the question. ‘Never mind that now.

Now the thing is to save our skins. I’m the only one who can
do that. it’s no job for a half-baked second mate. Look at you
-now - you don’t even know where you’re going.’

Durkins did not answer. A worried frown creased his

forehead. Some of the men looked at him anxiously. Jimson,
chief harpooner, ventured to say:

‘Mr Durkins sir, begging your pardon, where are we

heading?’

‘I don’t know,’ Durkins said honestly. I’m just keeping her

pointed south. Sooner or later we ought to raise one of the
French Islands - perhaps Tahiti, or Bora Bora, or one of the
Tuamotus.’

Grindle snorted. “That shows how little you know about it.
The islands are at least five hundred miles away. Loaded the
way we are, and what with contrary winds, we’ll be lucky if
we do ten miles a day. That’s fifty days. ‘How can we last
fifty days? We haven’t a scrap of food or drop of water. In ten
days every man in these boats will either be dead or stark
staring mad.’

A murmur of agreement ran through the crowd.

‘That’s right,’ said Bruiser. ‘The old boy has a point there.’

Durkins realized the uneasy mood of his crew.

‘Men,’ he said, ‘I didn’t ask for this job. If you’d rather the
Captain would take over, all you got to do is say so. But
don’t trust his figures. We’re closer than five hundred miles
to the islands and we might do a lot better than ten a day.
Sure, we have no food. But we might snag a few fish, and if
it rains we’ll catch drinking-water. Some small boats have
kept going for six months. We may or may not reach the
islands. But we could be picked up tomorrow by a ship. We
just have to take our chances. If you think the chances
would be better with Grindle, it’s up to you. Why don’t you
vote on it?’

Third mate Brown spoke up.

‘The mate has put it to you fair and square,’ he said. ‘You
know what sort of treatment you got from Grindle. If you
want to go back to that, vote for him. For Grindle, how
many?’

Brad hesitantly raised his hand.

‘And for the mate?’

There was a general show of hands, and cheers for the mate.
Grindle grumbled and mumbled and cast out dire threats
that he would have every last man of the crew hanged until
dead.

The hours dragged by. Grindle pushed aside the men who
stood close to him and sat down on a thwart. A sitting man
took up more room than a man standing, but Grindle had no
thought for the comfort of others.

As night came on the men could stand no longer. They

slumped down upon the thwarts or in the bottom of the
boat, lying across each other, sometimes three deep. In such
a case the man in the middle layer was the lucky one, for he
was kept warm by the bodies above and below him.
The water that continually splashed into the too heavily
loaded boat and the spume from the waves kept everyone
wet, and the night wind through wet clothes was chill.

The rising sun was welcome. How good it felt on shivering

flesh and cold bones!

But as it rose higher and grew hotter its equatorial fire

burned unshaded bodies and parched thirsty throats.

There was no sign of a ship. The only fish that appeared was
a hammer-head shark that swam alongside until someone
tried to strike it on the nose with an oar. The oar missed its
target and the shark swam away.
Chapter 26

An albatross named Bill

Gulls and terns swooped overhead but did not come close
enough to be caught. Far above floated a great white
albatross.

‘I’ll bet that’s Bill,’ said Bruiser. ‘He’s been following the ship
all the way from Hawaii. You’da thought he’da left us when
the ship went down, but he’s sticking by us. Makes a fella
sorta feel better. Good old Bill.’

The greatest of all sea-birds hovered overhead like a sort of

blessing. Whalemen have always been fond of the albatross,
or ‘goney’ as they choose to call it.

They are superstitious about it. They imagine the gonies to

be the souls of dead sailors, so fond of ships that even after
death they choose to follow the vessels day after day across
the sea. Antarctic cold does not bother them, nor tropic heat
- in fact, three varieties of albatross nest on islands west of
Hawaii.

To get closer to living sailors they may perch on the yards, or

even on the deck. They have little fear, for they know that
sailors will not harm them - dare not, for they might be their
own dead comrades. To kill an albatross would bring
disaster, as it did to Coleridge’s ancient mariner.

The bird the men called Bill had become very tame. He
would swoop down behind the ship to pick up scraps. He
would come aboard and hang around the galley door waiting
for the cook to throw him bits of

He was sometimes in the way when there was work to be

done, for he had a wing-spread of twelve feet. But he never
stayed long at one time because the motion of the ship
made him seasick, and there’s nothing more ridiculous or
pathetic than a seasick goney.

‘He won’t stay with us long when he finds we have no food

for him,’ said Durkins.

Bill lazily circled down until he was just over the whaleboat.
He floated, airborne, almost within reach. He held this
position without flapping his wings, in fact without the least
movement that anyone could see. His great shadow gave
the men a little relief from the scorching sun. The men
looked up and grinned at the friendly bird. Even when he
opened his long hooked bill and gave forth a hoarse ‘Br-a-a-
a-a!’ like the braying of a donkey, Bruiser said:

‘Sounds good, don’t it?’

‘Just like music,’ said Jiggs.

And another man put in: ‘Sorta like a protectin’ angel, ain’t
he?’

‘You sentimental fools!’ roared Captain Grindle. ‘Slug him

with an oar. Pull him down. That’s our dinner - pretty stringy
meat, but better than nothing.’

Some of the men protested loudly. Others were not so Mire.

Their hunger was greater than their respect for a bird, even
if it was the ghost of a dead sailor.
‘We’ll be ghosts ourselves if we don’t eat soon,’ grumbled
one.

‘If he’d take a message for us -‘ said Roger.

Grindle glared. ‘What kind of nonsense is that? In my day

boys kept their mouth shut and left the thinking to the men.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Scott. ‘Perhaps the boy has something

there. We have several accounts in the files of our museum
of just that sort of thing - I mean, a bird carrying a message.
Usually it was an albatross or a frigate-bird - because they
love ships - and are large enough to be easily noticed. Since
we haven’t any food for Bill, he will soon leave us. Chances
are he’ll make for the nearest ship.’

‘But who’ll pay any attention to a bird?’ objected Grindle.

‘We paid attention to this one, didn’t we?’ said Scott.

‘Remember, he’s half tame. Likely as not, he’ll come down
on the spars or the rail, looking for a hand-out. He’s so big
and handsome and friendly - they’ll notice him all right.’

‘And how’ll he give them our message? He can’t talk.’

‘Hee-haw! Hee-haw!’ said the albatross, sounding more than

ever like an indignant donkey. ‘Can’t talk indeed !’ he
seemed to be saying. ‘Just try me.’

‘We won’t depend upon his talking. We’ll fasten a message

to his leg.’

‘And who is apt to notice a little wad tied to a bird’s leg?’

scoffed Grindle.

‘We’ll tie a ribbon to it.’

Grindle roared with laughter. ‘Where do you think you’re
going to get a ribbon? What do you suppose this is-a girls’
school?’

Scott looked down at his shirt. It was a sports shirt, and it

happened to be red. ‘You fellows get the bird,’ he said, ‘and
I’ll supply the ribbon.’

“Still think we ought to eat ‘im,’ objected Grindle, but he

was smothered under the scrambling men reaching for one
of the trailing legs of the big bird. The goney kept just
beyond their grasp. When one man climbed on another
man’s shoulders the bird rose a few inches and still floated
clear.

Hal Hunt’s experience in taking animals alive stood him in

good stead now. He made a bight in a line, fashioned a slip-
knot, threw the lasso into the air and snared the bird’s right
foot. The goney was drawn down, braying like a dozen
donkeys, pecking at the men with his powerful hooked beak
and thrashing his great wings, so strong that they packed
the kick of a mule. There were several bruised pates and
shoulders before the mightiest of ocean birds, still braying
loudly, was held motionless by many strong hands.

In the meantime Scott had torn a page from his notebook

and with the help of the mate was constructing a message.
He read it to the men:

Crew of the wrecked ship Killer adrift in two boats.

Approximate bearings, 150° 5’ West, 3° South. Sailing
South. No food or water. Urgent.

The note was wrapped in a piece of sailcloth cut from a

seaman’s coat and tied to the bird’s right leg with a bit of
twine frayed from a rope’s end. Scott pulled his shirt out of
his slacks and tore from the bottom edge a long strip two
inches wide. The end of the strip was tied firmly to the bird’s
leg.

‘All right, let him go.’

Chapter 27

Winged messenger
The released bird with a final angry squawk soared into the
air, the red streamer fluttering behind him. Even at five
hundred yards Scott’s fiery shirt-tail could be plainly seen.

The goney struck out due west. He seemed delighted to

escape from his tormentors.

Nothing could more please the tormentors.

‘Disgusted with us, he is,’ said Bruiser. ‘He’s making straight

for another ship.’ Every hungry and thirsty man had a new
spark of courage and hope.

But in an hour the bird was back. He had evidently forgiven

his persecutors. Again he hovered over the boat, though he
was cautious enough to ride a little higher than before. His
red banner fluttered bravely in the breeze.

The men tried to shoo him away. ‘Go on - chase yourself !’

They made motions of throwing rocks at him, but
unfortunately they had no rocks nor anything else to throw.
The goney watched with beady eye for any scraps that
might be tossed overboard. Afternoon wore into dusk and
dusk into night and the bird still floated above.

Again the castaways huddled around and upon each other in

the bottom of the boats. Sleep was difficult, due to the
nagging misery of hunger and thirst.
But the first man to open his eyes at dawn roused the others
with a joyful shout:

‘Bill’s gone!’

They scanned the sky. There was not a sign of the great
white wanderer. Hopes rose high.

That factory ship we saw can’t be more than a few hundred

miles away,’ Jimson said. ‘She had about a dozen catchers.
That makes thirteen chances we’ll be picked up.’

‘Providin’ your stupid bird finds the ships,’ put in Grindle.

‘That goney ain’t got radar, you know.’

‘Birds have something very much like radar,’ said Scott.

Grindle tried another tack. He was determined to turn the

men against Durkins. If he could just make a fool of the
second mate he might still get back his command.

‘It it was me,’ he said. ‘I’d be makin’ straight for Christmas

Island. It’s due west, and it’s a lot closer than your French
islands.’

Durkins did not answer. But Bruiser spoke up smartly:

‘Shut your trap, Cap. With the wind the way it is we wouldn’t
get to Christmas by Christmas.’ ‘Our best bet is south,’ said
Jimson. ‘Our best bet is Bill,’ said Scott cheerfully. But as the
fresh morning air gave way to the scorching heat of midday
both bets began to seem very poor. The men looked at
Durkins with bloodshot eyes, inflamed by sun and brine.
Was he doing the right thing? Which would come first, Tahiti
or death? And were they idiots to be trusting their lives to a
bird?
They splashed sea-water on their clothes. This had a cooling
effect, but it did not last. Exposure to sea-water was bringing
out salt-water boils.

Hunger was agonizing. Even a belt or a boot began to look

good. One man tried chewing a leather bailing-bucket.

A small shark appeared. Jiggs dangled his bare foot over the
side to attract it. It was a dangerous experiment, but it
would be worth while if he got something to eat. -

The shark came closer, eyeing the flashing fishlike thing

that trailed through the water. Then it lunged.

Jiggs brought down an oar upon its head, jerking his foot
away at the same time.

Perhaps he was fortunate that the shark got only the big toe
and not the whole foot. The shark swam away, relishing this
titbit, while Jiggs and his companions still went hungry.

Men dying of thirst do not behave like ordinary people. Jiggs

felt no pain where the toe had been - he only saw the
dripping blood. He caught it in the palm of his hand and
drank it. Then Scott bandaged the stump with a fragment of
shirt-tail.

Another cold wet night, and another blistering day. Hunger

was less, but thirst was more. The stomach had given up its
demand for food. But the need for water had become a
shrieking pain.

Thirst had cracked the lips and swelled the tongue so that
every man talked as if he had a baked potato in his mouth.
Some began to drink sea-water.
‘Better not,’ said the mate, ‘unless you want to go off your
head.’

But the mate thought that he himself must be going out of

his mind when at the next dawn he saw a ship on the
horizon. He poked Hal Hunt. ‘Do you see what I see? Over
yonder.’ Hal rubbed his sore eyes. ‘It’s a ship and no
mistake. A catcher, I think.’

Some of the men cheered faintly. Others were too weak to

raise their heads. ‘Ill bet she’s looking for us,’ the mate said.
Grindle peered at the ship. ‘She may be looking for us, but
she won’t find us. We can see her because she’s big, but she
can’t see our sail at this distance.’

‘But she’s coming straight on. Pretty soon she will see us.’

But as they watched the ship veered slowly to the north and
then to the north-west. In half an hour she had disappeared.
T told you so,’ said Grindle.

The men sank into a heavy stupor. They lay as they had lain
all night, heaped in the bottom of the boat. Even the mate
was ready to give up. He closed his eyes and slept.

Hal never knew how much time went by before he heard

that whirring sound. Drowsily he looked up. Then he shouted
- as well as anyone could shout with a mouth full of tongue.
‘Look!’

Directly over the whaleboat hovered a small helicopter. It

settled to within twenty or thirty feet and the pilot looked
down. His grin was good to see. ‘How goes it?9 he shouted.
The mate tried to answer but could not command his

‘Got your message by bird,’ shouted the pilot. ‘Been looking

for you for two days. I’ll phone the catcher.’
They could hear him speaking over the radio telephone.
Then he looked down again.

‘Catcher 7 is just over the edge. Perhaps you saw her a while
back. She’ll be here in half an hour.’ And with a friendly
wave and another grin he rose to a safe altitude and waited.

The change in the men was remarkable. A few moments

before they had been sunk in misery and resigned to death.
Now it was as if they had just had a drink of fresh, cold
spring-water.

They strained their eyes for a glimpse of the ship. There it

was at last, a small white blob that rapidly swelled as the
catcher bore down at a speed of fifteen knots.

Hal estimated that she was a vessel of about four hundred

tons - a little larger than the bark Killer. She had a single
smokestack. There were two masts but they bore no sails.
Radio antennae stretched between them. At the peak of the
forward mast was a crow’s-nest and in it stood a lookout.

Now the name, Catcher 7, painted on the bows could be

plainly seen. Above it in the very bow was a platform on
which stood something that looked like a cannon. Hal knew
it must be a harpoon gun.

And to think that there were a dozen of these catchers,

every one of them bigger than Captain Grindle’s Killer. At
the masthead of every catcher was a lookout, watching for
whales. Even these twelve pairs of eyes were not enough.
Also there were the pilots of the little insect-like helicopters
which ranged across the sea more swiftly and widely than
any catcher could go. Whenever the helicopter pilot sighted
a whale he would radio back the news to the nearest
catcher.
And all these catchers and copters were just small chickens
compared to the great mother hen, the factory ship. A
catcher after killing a whale towed it to the factory ship
where it was hauled aboard and cut up. The modern floating
factory could process more whales in a day than the old-time
whale-ship in a month.

After the castaways had been taken aboard the catcher and
given a little water and a little food (too much at first would
have made them deathly sick) they were made comfortable
below deck in the bunks of the crew. There they slept the
day out.

At night they received a little more food and water, then

slept again while the catcher’s crew who had obligingly
given up their quarters got through the night as best they
could on benches in the messroom.

In the morning there was a bit more to drink and to eat, then
more sleep. Sleep! It seemed as if they could never get
enough of it.
Chapter 28

Whaling the easy way

The first one to bounce back was the youngest. It was about
noon when Roger woke to find that his tongue no longer felt
like a large potato, the dizziness and dullness were gone
from his head, and he was almost tempted to get up.

Presently he heard a running about on the deck above,

much shouting, then the boom of a gun. His curiosity got the
better of him. He slid out of his bunk, pulled on his clothes,
and went up on deck. His legs seemed to want to buckle
under him, but he managed to make his wobbly way
forward.

Several men were moving about on the gun platform. One of

them noticed him.

‘Come on up, boy,’ he called.

Roger climbed the few steps to the platform. The man at the
gun greeted him heartily.

‘Well, I’ll be danged if the kid isn’t the first one to get on his
feet. Good for you, lad.’

Roger said: ‘I thought I heard the gun.’

‘So you did, but we missed. A big sperm. He’s under now,
but he’ll probably be up again in a few minutes.’

Roger inspected the gun with interest. It looked quite like a

cannon, except that a harpoon projected from its muzzle.
‘Know how it works?’ asked the gunner. ‘Well, I’ve heard
about it,’ Roger said. ‘There’s a bomb in the harpoon. When
the harpoon goes into the whale the bomb explodes - and
kills the whale.’

‘You’re ninety per cent right,’ grinned the gunner. ‘I mean,

about ninety per cent of the whalers still use bomb
harpoons. We don’t. This is the very latest - the electric
harpoon.’ ‘How is that better?’

‘Several ways. One trouble with the bomb is that when it

explodes it scatters bits of steel through the flesh. When the
whale goes into the factory these steel fragments damage
the saws. Another thing - a bomb killing is very painful. The
whale doesn’t die at once. He suffers terrible agony. Why
make him suffer if it isn’t necessary? And there’s one more
point: agony poisons the meat. Doctors say it’s the same
way with humans; if you suffer terrible worry or pain your
system becomes toxic -poisoned. Toxic whale meat is no
good. But with the electric harpoon it’s a different story. It
packs a wallop of two hundred and twenty volts, one
hundred amperes. The electric shock kills the whale before
he has time to get poisoned. In ten seconds he’s a dead
duck. It’s as painless as the electric chair.’

Roger smiled. This gunner made the electric chair sound

almost attractive. Well, perhaps it was better than a long-
drawn-out death agony.

‘If the electric harpoon is so good,’ he said, ‘why don’t they

all use it?’

‘Because it’s new. Some of them are afraid it won’t work. The
most progressive companies already use it -they all will in
time. You’ll see for yourself what kind of a job it does.’
‘Breaches!’ came a call from the masthead. ‘Five points off
the weather-bow.’

The whale had surfaced half a mile away. The two-thousand-

horsepower diesel of the catcher sprang into action. The
catcher raced towards its quarry. The whale was swimming
away at full speed, but the catcher swiftly overhauled it.

How easy, Roger thought, compared with the back-breaking

labour at the oars of a whaleboat! And how swift. And safe.
The monster that could smash a whaleboat to bits and kill its
crew was no great danger to the men on the deck of this
four-hundred-ton, steel-hulled catcher. Modern methods
were certainly more efficient, but they had taken much of
the adventure out of whaling.

The catcher slid up beside the speeding whale. The gunner

swivelled his gun into position.

‘Want to shoot?’ he asked Roger. ‘When I say “Fire”, pull the

trigger.’

He sighted the gun carefully, then said: ‘Fire!’

Roger pressed the trigger. The harpoon shot out, trailing a

line to which was bound an insulated electric wire carrying
the fatal charge. The harpoon sank deep just behind the
head.

Without a groan, without a tremor, the whale rolled over on

its side, dead.

A line was dropped over the tail flukes. With the seventy-ton
monster in tow the catcher ploughed on with scarcely any
lessening of its former speed.
Chapter 29

Marvels of the factory ship

Late in the afternoon the factory ship hove in sight. To Roger
it looked as big as an aircraft carrier.

‘She’s a whopper!’ he said.

Thirty thousand tons,’ said the gunner who had befriended

him.

Roger thought of the three-hundred-ton Killer, a ship that

would have been considered large in the whaling days of the
past century. This vessel was one hundred times as big.

But not as beautiful. Instead of twenty white sails billowing

in the breeze she carried two grimy smokestacks. The
curious thing about them was that they were not one.
behind the other, as on an ordinary ship, but side by side.

The most amazing thing about this ship was that it seemed
to have lost its rear end. It was chopped off square. Where
the stern should have been was a great gaping hole, wide
enough for two railway trains.

They haul the whale right up into the ship through that
hole,’ said the gunner. ‘You’ll see how it works

when they take your whale aboard.’

The gunner’s words, ‘your whale’, gave Roger a thrill. Of

course, he had only pulled the trigger - yet it was exciting to
think that he had shot one of the greatest animals on earth.
It was a mixed feeling. Along with the thrill was the regret
that the great and wonderful sea monster had had to be
killed.

The factory ship was well named. It sounded like a factory.

On the Killer there had been no sound but the talk of the
men. Here the voices of men were drowned by the roar of
the machinery.

There was the hum of scores of motors, the rattle of chains,

the grinding of gears, the clank of arms of iron that did what
human arms had once done. Yet it took men, skilled men, to
run the machinery. Roger learned from the gunner that the
crew of the factory ship was three hundred strong.

They were close enough now to see half a dozen helicopters

perched like ladybirds on the ship’s forward deck.

The others are out looking for whales.’ said the gunner. ‘We
have a dozen altogether.’

The name painted on the bow of the factory ship was Queen
of the South.

‘Why the South?’ asked Roger. This is the tropics.’

‘Yes, but our main business is in the Antarctic You see, there
are international rules that govern whaling. Up here we can
take only sperms. Down south, during the season, we can
take blues and fin-whales and seis and humpbacks and most
anything we like. We’re on our way there now. Down there
we’ll really get busy. We’ll be at it day and night. Our factory
ship alone processes fifteen hundred whales a year. And this
is only one of many. The total catch is over thirty thousand
whales a year. Some people think whaling is a thing of the
past. On the contrary, it’s never been as big as it is today.’
‘What kind of a plane is that?’ asked Roger, pointing to an
indistinct white object floating in the cloud of steam above
the factory ship.

‘Why, that’s your albatross. He’s adopted us now. He likes

the scraps of blubber that get thrown overboard. We often
have an albatross hanging around and wouldn’t have paid
any attention to this one if it hadn’t been for that red rag
tied to his foot. We caught him and found your message.’
‘Good old Bill!’ said Roger fervently. Catcher 7 snugged up
alongside the Queen of the South. The twenty-three
castaways were taken aboard. Some could walk, others had
to be carried, and all were given comfortable quarters in the
depths of the great ship. The ship’s doctor skilfully attended
to their needs. Roger, still boiling with curiosity, was soon on
deck again. There he found Hal and Mr Scott talking to
Captain Ramsay of Queen of the South.

They were gazing down at the cutting-deck. A whale was

being dragged in through the great hole in the ship’s stern.
A winch groaned as it wound in a steel cable attached to
what looked like a gigantic pair of pincers clamped on to the
monster’s tail. My whale! thought Roger, but said nothing.
‘That was brought in by our catcher,’ his big brother
informed him.

‘You don’t say!’ said Roger in mock surprise. ‘Do tell me all
about it.’

Hal was glad to find his young brother so eager to learn.

‘Well, you see, there’s a platform in the bow of the catcher,
and a gun on the platform.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Roger, making his eyes round.

“The gun holds a harpoon instead of a bullet It fires the

harpoon into the whale. There’s a bomb in the harpoon - it
explodes and kills the whale.’

‘Well now, I never!’ said Roger. ‘Gosh, a kid can learn

something new every day if he just has a big brother to tell
him things.’

Hal looked at him suspiciously. Just at this moment the

gunner of Catcher 7 joined them.

‘Well, if it ain’t my young friend,’ he said. ‘That’s your whale

right there, boy.’

Hal looked puzzled, ‘What do you mean - how is it his

whale?’

‘Why, he shot it, of course.’

Hal stared. ‘You young rascal! What were you up to while I

was asleep?’

‘Oh,’ said Roger, ‘I was just learning that you can’t believe
all you hear. Like that about bombs and harpoons. That’s
old-fashioned. These catchers have electric harpoons. But
then | you can’t expect to be hep to what’s new if you spend
all your time sleeping below decks.’

Hal swooped to grab his mischievous brother with every

intention of paddling his rear end. But he found himself too
weak to move fast and the youngster easily evaded him. The
gunner and Captain Ramsay were laughing.

‘Yes,’ said the captain, ‘things change pretty fast nowadays.

If you want to see speed, watch the way they put through
this whale.’

Roger’s whale was already being peeled like a banana.

Blubber hooks, operated by machinery, plunged into the
hide, took hold, and ripped it off in great strips. Knives
attacked the strips and cut them into chunks four feet
square. More hooks seized the chunks, dragged them to
holes in the deck that looked like oversized manholes, and
down went the blubber into cookers below deck.

Suddenly there was a shout, a scream from the winches, and

the carcass as big-as a railway carriage was turned over as
easily as one would flip a pancake. Then the other side was
peeled in the same way.

Another roar of machinery and the skinned carcass was

frisked through a tunnel - Hell’s Gate, the captain said it was
called because of the rolling steam and deafening noise that
came out of it - to the forward deck.

Here there were more machines that sliced off the meat

faster than one could carve a turkey. Down went the meat
through more holes in the deck. Not just any hole. Each part
had a hole of its own, and under each hole was a machine to
handle that part of the whale and nothing else.

The liver, weighing a ton, went down to the liver plant. The
pituitary gland took a different route, the pancreas another,
and so on. Each went down to special pots and special
chemists who knew just what to do with them. In five
minutes there was nothing left of the whale but the skeleton.

Even that was not to be wasted. Huge power-saws, each

fifteen feet long, descended to saw up the great bones and
drop the pieces into bone-boilers where the oil would be
cooked out of them. What was left would be ground into
bonemeal.

It was only half an hour since Roger’s whale had come

aboard and now it had completely disappeared. ‘We can
process forty-eight whales in twenty-four
hours,’ said the captain. ‘Thirty minutes for each whale.
There are ten thousand tons of machinery on this ship. Most
of it you can’t see - it’s down below. There are two decks
under that whale-deck, both of them full of processing
plants and laboratories. Also there’s a freshwater plant. The
cookers require a lot of water and it must be fresh. We take
in salt water and turn it into fresh at the rate of two
thousand tons a day. Want to see the bridge?’

They climbed to the bridge. Here there were more wonders.

An automatic pilot kept the ship on course. A radar screen
showed everything within forty miles. A fathometer told the
depth of water beneath the ship. A local phone made it
possible to talk to any man anywhere on the vessel. A radio
telephone reached far out, so that the captain could chat
with the captain of any one of his catchers or the pilot of any
one of his helicopters. Not only that - it was just as easy to
talk to the owners in London on the other side of the world.

It was even possible to receive messages from whales. When

a whale that had been killed could not be brought in at once
it was left afloat and a small radio transmitter was shot into
its hide. This gave out continuous signals that were picked
up by an instrument on the bridge of the factory ship. Thus
the location of the floating whale was known exactly and it
could be picked up whenever convenient.

The boys were still studying these marvels when another

visitor appeared on the bridge. It was Captain Grindle.

‘I want to see the captain,’ he snapped.

‘You’re talking to him,’ said Captain Ramsay.

‘Sir, I am Captain Grindle, master of the bark Killer. I have

come to demand action. If you don’t give it to me at once I’ll
report you to the police.’
Captain Ramsay gazed with surprise at the bristling Grindle.
One of his catchers had saved this man and his crew from
almost certain death. He had supposed that Grindle had
come up to thank him. Instead of expressing gratitude
Grindle was scolding and threatening. At the very least, he
was showing very bad manners. However, Captain Ramsay’s
reply was quiet and polite.

‘You have had a very unfortunate experience, Captain

Grindle. We are glad to have been of service to you. If
there’s anything more we can do for you, you have only to
let us know.’

‘I’ll let you know fast enough,’ Grindle rasped. ‘And if you
don’t do what I say you’ll suffer for it.’

‘Now, now, my dear captain,’ said Ramsay soothingly. ‘1

know you’ve had a rough time of it and it has upset your
nerves. Suppose you just relax and tell me what I can do for
you.’

‘Relax, the man says! Relax!’ roared Grindle. ‘I’ll not relax till
this thing is set right. My ship was sunk and we had to take
to the boats. You know that much. But I’ll bet the skunks
didn’t tell you the rest of it. They didn’t tell you that they
mutinied. They didn’t tell you that they put me, their
captain, in the brig. They didn’t tell you that their
carelessness sank the ship. They didn’t tell you that you
have a pack of mutineers on board at this very minute.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Captain Ramsay, ‘your second

mate has told me the whole story - of course, from his point
of vie,w.’

“Then why didn’t you clap them in the brig instead of

tucking them in soft beds, feeding them pap, and having
your doctor fussing over them as if they were innocent
babes instead of desperate criminals?’

‘In the first place,’ said Captain Ramsay, ‘we have no brig.
We don’t need it. In the second place, mutiny on your ship is
your responsibility, not mine. Of course I’ll give you any
reasonable assistance. I should say that the first thing for
you to do is to notify the owners. Who are they?’

‘Kane Whaling Company, St Helena. I’ll send Mr Kane a

radiogram - and will I make it a sizzler!’

‘You can do better than send him a message,’ suggested

Captain Ramsay. ‘You can talk to him.’

‘Talk! Do you realize St Helena is half-way round the world

from here?’

‘Of course.’ Captain Ramsay took up the phone and spoke to

his radio operator. ‘Call the radio station on St Helena. Have
them connect with Mr Kane of the Kane Whaling Company.
Sunset here - it’ll be early morning there. Get him up out of
bed if necessary. It’s important.’

In an amazingly short time Grindle found himself talking to

his boss. True to his word he told a sizzling story. Some of it
was true, most of it was not.

He told of the mutiny. He said nothing of the events that had

led up to it - the brutalities, the flogging of the men, the
harsh treatment of Roger, the death of the sailmaker
dragged at the end of a line until he was taken by a shark.

Hal, listening, was astonished to hear his own name

mentioned. He was named the chief conspirator. He, Grindle
said, had stirred up the men to mutiny, and he should be the
first to hang. Grindle, evidently, had never forgiven Hal for
telling him he was unfit to command a ship, for beating him
in a fight, and, worst of all, for saving him from the sinking
ship. Gratitude being an emotion unknown to him, Grindle
nursed a grudge because he had had to be rescued by his
enemy.

His story told, he listened to Mr Kane’s instructions. He

nodded and grunted and nodded again, and an evil smile
spread over his face. When he put down the phone he
seemed highly satisfied.

‘My orders are,’ he said, ‘to place all the mutineers under
arrest. Special provision for Hunt - he’s to be put

in solitary confinement. First chance I get I’m to take ‘em all

back to Honolulu for a hearing before the British Consul.’ He
grinned happily and his bristles stood out like black needles.
‘They’re as good as hanged already.’

‘As for arrest,’ said Captain Ramsay, ‘I can’t help you. I can
only assure you they won’t escape from this ship. As for
transportation, I’ll provide it. As soon as your men are able
to travel I’ll put you all aboard one of my catchers and send
you to Honolulu. It’s not so far - at fifteen knots you should
be there in less than two days. You can radio the Honolulu
police and have them meet the ship as she docks and jail
your mutineers until the time comes for the hearing. I hope
you feel that I am giving you every possible co-operation.’

Grindle only grunted. His contemptuous gaze swept over

Captain Ramsay and his visitors, and as he stamped his way
off the bridge he could be heard mumbling: ‘Good as
hanged already!’
Chapter 30

To African adventure
When the catcher pulled up to the Honolulu docks two days
later a row of police-vans were there to meet it.

The mutineers were loaded into the vans and trundled away
to enjoy the dubious comforts of the Honolulu jail.

Only two men did not go behind bars - the one who had
most to do with the trouble and the one who had least to do
with it - Captain Grindle, and his passenger, Mr Scott. Scott
took advantage of his freedom to see the British Consul and
give him his own honest account of what had happened on
the Killer.

Also he cabled John Hunt at his wild animal farm on Long

Island, New York:

‘Your boys are in Honolulu jail.’

John Hunt lost no time in winging his way to Honolulu.

At the hearing Grindle told his side of the story and his men
told theirs; The result was severely disappointing to Captain
Grindle. The Consul in his report to Mr Kane recommended
clemency towards the mutineers.
The owner cabled back that he would prefer no charges
against them.

They were set free.

As for Grindle, who had expected to see his crew hanged, he

himself barely escaped the same fate. With all his brutalities
exposed to view, he was condemned by press and public all
the way from Honolulu to St Helena and back. He was never
to command another ship.

John Hunt, famous explorer, collector of wild beasts for zoos

and circuses, sat in the garden of the Royal Hawaiian with
his two sons and Mr Scott.

They looked out upon the glittering semicircle of Waikiki

Beach and the sparkling bay dotted with surf-riders, canoes
and catamarans. Behind it all rose the grim bulk of Diamond
Head.

People strolling by looked at the four curiously. Most of the

hotel guests had come from sunless offices on the mainland
for a two weeks vacation and looked as pale as if they had
lived under stones; but these four were as golden brown as
ripe coconuts.

Perhaps some of the passers-by recognized the two boys, for

pictures of all the mutineers had appeared in the papers.

Hal said to his father: ‘Hope you don’t mind being seen with
a couple of jailbirds.’ John Hunt smiled.

‘No, indeed. Quite the opposite. I’m proud to be seen with

you.’

‘You have reason to be,’ said Scott warmly. ‘Your boys had
some tough breaks. When I think of the night Roger put in
on that whale fighting off sharks and killers - and the way he
prevented Grindle’s escape by pulling the plug of the boat -
and the way Hal gave Grindle a blubber-bath and later
saved him from going down with the ship - I think the boys
did you a lot of credit.’

‘Anyhow,’ said Mr Hunt, ‘you certainly packed a lot of

experience and adventure into three weeks. It may have
been tough, but it’s been good education. Perhaps you’ve
had enough of that sort of education for a while and would
like to go home and rest.’

The suggestion was not received with enthusiasm. In fact

the boys looked as glum as if there had just been a death in
the family.

‘Who wants to rest?’ said Roger. ‘We’ll have plenty of time to

rest when we get to be your age.’

John Hunt laughed. ‘And I’m afraid you won’t rest then,
either. No, the Hunts aren’t very good resters. Well, if you
don’t want to rest, I have another proposition for you.’

The boys perked up immediately. New excitement came into

their eyes.

‘Whatever it is, we accept,’ said Hal.

‘Now, don’t be in too big a hurry. You may not like it. Africa is
quite different from the Pacific’

‘Africa!’ exclaimed Roger. His eyes shone like saucers.

‘Yes, Africa. Land of the malaria mosquito, the tsetse fly, the
crocodile, man-eating lions and leopards, and all sorts of
uncomfortable things.’
He was trying to scare the boys, but he could see that he
was not succeeding.

‘Go on,’ said Hal. ‘What do you want us to do in Africa?’

‘Well, we’re getting orders for more African animals than we

can supply. Some of the zoos want hippos and rhinos and
giraffes. A big circus wants elephants and lions. Of course,
they all have to be taken alive - and that’s a lot harder than
taking them dead. I’ll go with you and get you started. We
can fly from here by way of Hong Kong and Calcutta to
Nairobi. We’ll engage a good white hunter and he’ll take us
on safari. Think about it until tomorrow morning.’

The boys did not need to think about it - they had already
decided. And yet they thought of little else all night. Their
dreams were full of roaring lions and rampaging hippos and
charging elephants. But they never gave a thought to the
most dangerous monsters of the African jangle, the
mosquito and the fly.

And how they fared with the creatures of Africa, great and
small, will have to be told in another book, African
Adventure.