Fighting the Whales by R. M. Ballantyne (great reads txt) 📕

Bill Blunt, if all the thoughts that you think, and especially the jokes that you utter, wos put down in the log, they’d be so heavy that I do believe they would sink the ship!”

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

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

“Thousands of ’em, I suppose,” said one of the men.

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

“How much is billions, mate?” inquired Bill.

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

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

“Come, Fred, let’s hear it then,” said Tom.

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

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

“What’s a microscope?” inquired one of the men.

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

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

“‘I’ve found,’ said he, ‘that the greenness of these seas is in truth caused by uncountable numbers of medusae—’”

“Ha! that’s the word,” shouted Tom Lokins, “Medoosy, that’s wot the captain calls ’em. Heave ahead, Fred.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I know,” cried one, “it would take the whole forty thousand a week to do it.”

“Oh! nonsense, they could do it easy in two days,” said another.

“That shows how little you know about big numbers,” observed Tom Lokins, knocking the ashes out of his pipe. “I’m pretty sure it couldn’t be done in much less than six months; workin’ hard all day, and makin’ allowance for only one hour off for dinner.”

“You’re all wrong, shipmates,” said Fred Borders. “That young doctor told me that if they’d begun work at the day of creation they would only have just finished the job last year!”

“Oh! gammon, you’re jokin’,” cried Bill Blunt.

“No, I’m not,” said Fred, “for I was told afterwards by an old clergyman that the young doctor was quite right, and that any one who was good at ’rithmetic could work the thing out for himself in less than half-an-hour.”

Just as Fred said this there came a loud cry from the mast-head that made us all spring to our feet like lightning.

“There she blows! There she breaches!”

The captain was on deck in a moment.

“Where away?” he cried.

“On the lee beam, sir. Sperm whale, about two miles off. There she blows!”

Every man was at his station in a moment; for, after being some months out, we became so used to the work, that we acted together like a piece of machinery. But our excitement never abated in the least.

“Sing out when the ship heads for her.”

“Ay, ay, sir.”

“Keep her away!” said the captain to the man at the helm. “Bob Ledbury, hand me the spyglass.”

“Steady,” from the mast-head.

“Steady it is,” answered the man at the helm.

While we were all looking eagerly out ahead we heard a thundering snore behind us, followed by a heavy splash. Turning quickly round, we saw the flukes of an enormous whale sweeping through the air not more than six hundred yards astern of us.

“Down your helm,” roared the captain; “haul up the mainsail, and square the yards. Call all hands.”

“All hands, ahoy!” roared Bill Blunt, in a voice of thunder, and in another moment every man in the ship was on deck.

“Hoist and swing the boats,” cried the captain. “Lower away.”

Down went the boats into the water; the men were into their places almost before you could wink, and we pulled away from the ship just as the whale rose the second time, about half a mile away to leeward.

From the appearance of this whale we felt certain that it was one of the largest we had yet seen, so we pulled after it with right good will. I occupied my usual place in the captain’s boat, next the bow-oar, just beside Tom Lokins, who was ready with his harpoons in the bow. Young Borders pulled the oar directly in front of me. The captain himself steered, and, as our crew was a picked one, we soon left the other two boats behind us.

Presently a small whale rose close beside us, and, sending a shower of spray over the boat, went down in a pool of foam. Before we had time to speak, another whale rose on the opposite side of the boat, and then another on our starboard bow. We had got into the middle of a shoal of whales, which commenced leaping and spouting all round us, little aware of the dangerous enemy that was so near.

In a few minutes more, up comes the big one again that we had first seen. He seemed very active and wild. After blowing on the surface once or twice, about a quarter of a mile off, he peaked his flukes, and pitched down head foremost.

“Now then, lads, he’s down for a long dive,” said the captain; “spring your oars like men, we’ll get that fish for certain, if you’ll only pull.”

The captain was mistaken; the whale had only gone down deep in order to come up and breach, or spring out of the water, for the next minute he came up not a hundred yards from us, and leaped his whole length into the air.

A shout of surprise broke from the men, and no wonder, for this was the largest fish I ever saw or heard of, and he came up so clear of the water that we could see him from head to tail as he turned over in the air, exposing his white belly to view, and came down on his great side with a crash like thunder, that might have been heard six miles off. A splendid mass of pure white spray burst from the spot where he fell, and in another moment he was gone.

“I do believe it’s New Zealand Tom,” cried Bill Blunt, referring to an old bull whale that had become famous among the men who frequented these seas for its immense size and fierceness, and for the great trouble it had given them, smashing some of their boats, and carrying away many of their harpoons.

“I don’t know whether it’s New Zealand Tom or not,” said the captain, “but it’s pretty clear that he’s an old sperm bull. Give way, lads, we must get that whale whatever it should cost us.”

We did not need a second bidding; the size of the fish was so great that we felt more excited than we had yet been during the voyage, so we bent our oars till we almost pulled the boat out of the water. The other boats had got separated, chasing the little whales, so we had this one all to ourselves.

“There she blows!” said Tom Lokins, in a low voice, as the fish came up a short distance astern of us.

We had overshot our mark, so, turning about, we made for the whale, which kept for a considerable time near the top of the water, spouting now and then, and going slowly to windward. We at last got within a few feet of the monster, and the captain suddenly gave the word, “Stand up.”

This was to our harpooner, Tom Lokins,