Hawaii - James Michener [132]
"They're sparm!" Captain Hoxworth exulted. "Look at 'em!" and he passed Whipple a telescope. In the glass John spied the enormous beasts, wallowing in the sea and spouting a mixture of water and compressed air more than fifteen feet into the air.
"How many whales are there out there?" Whipple asked.
"Thirty?" Hoxworth suggested cautiously.
"How many will you try to take?"
"We'll be lucky if we get one. Sparm's smart whales."
Whipple watched the lead boat try to sneak up on a particularly large monster, but it moved aggravatingly off, so the mate directed his whaleboat onto a substitute, a huge gray-blue sperm that lazed along in the sun. Creeping up to it from the rear and on the right side, the mate maneuvered his prow deftly into the whale's long flank, and the harpooner, poised with left leg extended securely into the bottom of the boat, right cocked precariously against the gunwales, drew the harpoon back in his left hand and then flashed it with incredible might deep into the whale's resistant body.
At this first agonizing moment the great beast flipped out of the water, the harpoon lines trailing, and Whipple cried, "It's bigger than the Thetis!" For the men of the Carthaginian had hooked into a mammoth whale.
"It'll make eighty barrels!" a seaman cried.
"If we take him," Hoxworth cautioned. Grabbing the glass from Whipple, he watched the manner in which the whale plunged in its first attempt to shake off tormentors. "He's sounded," the captain reported ominously, waiting to see how the first mad dash of the monster would be handled by the crew.
Whipple could see the rope whirring out of the harpooner's tub, with a sailor poised ready with an ax to chop it free--thus losing the whale if trouble developed--and it seemed as if the leviathan must be probing the very bottom of the ocean, so much rope went out. The minutes passed, and there was no sign of the whale. The other two boats placed themselves out of the way, yet ready to assist if the whale surfaced near them.
Then, in an unexpected quarter, and not far from the Carthaginian, the whale surfaced. It came roaring up through the waves, twisted, turned, flapped its great flukes, then blew. A tower of red blood spurted high into the air, a monument of bubbling death, and poised there for a moment in the sunlight as if it were a pillar of red marble, falling back at last into the sea to make the waves crimson. Four more times the huge beast spouted its lungs' burden of blood. Hoxworth, noting the color, shouted, "He's well struck!"
Now came the most tense moment of the fight, for the anguished whale hesitated, and all knew that if it came out of this pause in the wrong direction it might stove the whaleboats, or crush them in its powerful underslung jaw, or even crash headfirst into the Carthaginian herself, sinking her within minutes, in the way many whalers had been lost. This time the whale ran true, and at a speed of thirty miles an hour, rushed through the open ocean, dragging the whaleboat along behind. Now the sail was furled and the four rowers sat with their oars aloft, while their mates aboard the Carthaginian shouted, "There goes the Nantucket sleigh ride!"
In this way six men in a little rowboat fought an enormous whale to death. The beast dived and paused, spouted blood and dived again. It ran for the open sea, and doubled back, but the harpoon worked deeper into its flank, and the rope remained taut. When the whale moved close to the boat, the oarsmen worked feverishly hauling in rope; but when the beast fled, they played it out again; and in this wild red game of take in and play out, the whale began to sense that it would be the loser.
Now a second whaleboat crept in, and its harpooner launched another cruel shaft of iron deep into the whale's forward quarter, and the chase was on again, this time with two whaleboats on the sleigh ride. Swiftly, they were hauled through