I manned stroke oar in the mate’s boat, and on one occasion our harpooner made fast to a medium-sized sperm whale, perhaps thirty-five feet in length, which showed very little fight, and which we overtook soon after the iron had been planted. The first pricks of the terrible lance, thrust and “churned” by the mate, evidently found its life, for the whale went immediately into a flurry, swimming desperately around the boat, and rolling over and over so that the line encircled it many times. Then, while we watched its dying struggles at close range, the beast began to belch up squids. Barrelful after barrelful of the tentacled creatures, some but freshly swallowed, others in advanced stages of disintegration, floated to the surface all about our boat. Most of them seemed to have bodies a foot and a half or two feet long, but some were larger. By the time the whale floated fin-out and lay still, the slimy carcasses and fragments of squids covered the space of an acre or more.Eleven months in the “Daisy,” and participation in the exciting slaughter and subsequent butchery of twenty-seven sperm whales, never brought me, alas, the thrill that may not come even once in a lifetime—a find of native ambergris. The search was made in every whale, as the final stage of the cutting-in, but it seemed to be a half-hearted effort, the expression of a forlorn hope, much as though you should scan the gutter along twenty blocks of Broadway in a deliberate, cold-blooded hunt for a five-dollar bill that somebody might have lost.
I remember particularly one vast but scrawny bull, the blubber of which contained much less oil than his size had promised. If the tradition of the sea is correct, he was a typical “ambergris fish.” The cutting-in went on from mid-afternoon until well into the night. The “Daisy,” with topsails aback, rolled gently in the quiet swell of a tropical evening, while the officers on the cutting stage punched with their spades as best they could in the dim light of lanterns and oil-soaked torches. The flickering glare showed the indistinct hulk of the whale alongside, and the flash of bloody wavelets beyond. On deck a cresset of burning blubber-scrap, and the fiery chimneys of the try-works in full blast, cast enough illumination to reveal the great blankets of blubber and the greasy, toiling figures scurrying about amid the shouting of orders, the creak of tackles, and the clank of chains. At six bells the last strip came over the plank-sheer. The severed head floated by the starboard quarter, lashed securely and ready to be handled at daybreak. Only the rite of the whaleman’s ultimate hope remained to be carried out before the flensed carcass should be cut adrift.
The Old Man joined his officers on the cutting stage. Then, with methodical movements, he and the three mates thrust freshly sharpened cutting-spades deeply into the guts of the whale, twisted them, cautiously withdrew them, smelled the bright steel blades, and scrutinized them painstakingly in the light of a lantern, while the crew looked on in fevered anticipation. Back and forth along the stage the four men trod and jabbed, until the vitals had been intimately explored. But nary a whiff of the longed-for odor was forthcoming, and so to bed.
