05 Whale Adventure (15 page)

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.

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.

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?’