Hawaii - James Michener [133]
"He's a monster, that one!" Captain Hoxworth said approvingly. 'Pray God he doesn't catch one of the boats."
The minutes passed and then the quarter hours, and the whale fought on, bleeding profusely and seeking the safer depths; but always he had to surface, a great bull sperm whale in agony, until finally, after a last mighty surge through the red waves, he rolled over and was dead.
"Got him!" Captain Hoxworth shouted, as the third whaleboat moved in to attach its line to the second, and in this manner the three crews slowly began to tow the whale back to their mother ship. The Carthaginian, meanwhile, manipulated its sails so that it could move with equal caution toward the oncoming whale.
Aboard ship there was much activity. Along the starboard side a section of railing was lifted away, and a small platform was lowered six or eight feet above the surface of the sea. Men brought out razor-sharp blubber knives with twenty-foot handles. Others laboriously lugged huge iron hooks, each weighing almost as much as a man, into position for biting into the blubber and pulling it aboard. Where Abner was to have preached, the cook and his helper piled dry wood for firing the try-pots in which the whale oil would be rendered, while forward the scar-faced cooper supervised the opening of the hatch and the airing of barrels into which that blubber would be stowed that could not be immediately cooked. Just as these preparations were completed, with John Whipple noting each step in the process, and Abner Hale trying not to do so because all was being done on a Sunday, the whale was brought alongside and Whipple cried, "It's longer than the Thetis," but Captain Hoxworth, who like all whalers never referred to the length of a whale, growled, "He'll make eighty, ninety barrels. A monster."
When the great sperm was lashed to the starboard side of the Carthaginian, and when the frail platform was adjusted, a black Brava sailor, from the Cape Verdes, nimbly leaped onto the whale's body and with a slashing knife tried to cut at the blubber so as to attach the giant hooks that were being lowered to him. Deft as he was, he could not make the enormous hooks fast, and when the Carthaginian took a sudden shift to windward, the Brava was struck in the chest by one of the swaying hooks and swept off the whale's flank and intp the ocean, whereupon a dozen sleek sharks who had been following the blood stormed down upon him, but the men on the platform slashed and cut at the raiders and drove ithem off, so that the Brava climbed back on the whale, cursing in Portuguese, and this time, dripping in blood from whale and shark alike, he caught the brutal hooks into the blubber, and the unwinding was ready to begin. But before it could start, the whale's great head--twenty-six feet long and weighing tons--had to be cut away and fastened to the after end of the ship.
"You, Brava!” Captain Hoxworth shouted. "Tie this hook into the head!" And the sinewy black man leaped nimbly onto the whale's head, securing the hook, after which his mates with extra sharp knives on long poles sawed away the mammoth head.
When it drifted clear, they directed their knives to the body of the whale, slashing the thick blubbery skin in sloping spirals that started from where the head had been and ran down to the huge tail hanging limp in the sea. As the skilled workmen cut, they frequently paused for sport and slashed their deadly knives deep into some shark that had come to feed upon the carcass, and when the knife was withdrawn the shark would twist slightly, as if a bee had stung him, and continue feeding.
Now the men on the lines leading to heavy hooks began to haul, and slowly the whale rolled over and over upon itself while the blanket or blubber unpeeled in a huge spiral and was hauled aloft, When more than a dozen feet hung over the deck, one iron hook was cut free from