1. MARDI.
1. CHAPTER I.
We are off! The courses and topsails are set: the
coral-hung anchor swings from the bow: and together, the
three royals are given to the breeze, that follows us out to
sea like the baying of a hound. Out spreads the canvas—
alow, aloft—boom-stretched, on both sides, with many a
stun' sail; till like a hawk, with pinions poised, we shadow
the sea with our sails, and reelingly cleave the brine.
But whence, and whither wend ye, mariners?
We sail from Ravavai, an isle in the sea, not very far
northward from the tropic of Capricorn, nor very far westward
from Pitcairn's island, where the mutineers of the
Bounty settled. At Ravavai I had stepped ashore some
few months previous; and now was embarked on a cruise
for the whale, whose brain enlightens the world.
And from Ravavai we sail for the Gallipagos, otherwise
called the Enchanted Islands, by reason of the many wild
currents and eddies there met.
Now, round about those isles, which Dampier once trod,
where the Spanish bucaniers once hived their gold moidores,
the Cachalot, or sperm whale, at certain seasons abounds.
But thither, from Ravavai, your craft may not fly, as flies
the sea-gull, straight to her nest. For, owing to the prevalence
of the trade winds, ships bound to the northeast from
the vicinity of Ravavai are fain to take something of a circuit;
a few thousand miles or so. First, in pursuit of the
variable winds, they make all haste to the south; and there,
at length picking up a stray breeze, they stand for the main:
then, making their easting, up helm, and away down the
coast, toward the Line.
This round-about way did the Arcturion take; and in all
conscience a weary one it was. Never before had the
ocean appeared so monotonous; thank fate, never since.
But bravo! in two weeks' time, an event. Out of the
gray of the morning, and right ahead, as we sailed along, a
dark object rose out of the sea; standing dimly before us,
mists wreathing and curling aloft, and creamy breakers frothing
round its base.—We turned aside, and, at length, when
day dawned, passed Massafuero. With a glass, we spied two
or three hermit goats winding down to the sea, in a ravine;
and presently, a signal: a tattered flag upon a summit beyond.
Well knowing, however, that there was nobody on
the island but two or three noose-fulls of runaway convicts
from Chili, our captain had no mind to comply with their
invitation to land. Though, haply, he may have erred in
not sending a boat off with his card.
A few days more and we “took the trades.” Like favors
snappishly conferred, they came to us, as is often the case,
in a very sharp squall; the shock of which carried away
one of our spars; also our fat old cook off his legs; depositing
him plump in the scuppers to leeward.
In good time making the desired longitude upon the equator,
a few leagues west of the Gallipagos, we spent several
weeks chassezing across the Line, to and fro, in unavailing
search for our prey. For some of their hunters believe,
that whales, like the silver ore in Peru, run in veins through
the ocean. So, day after day, daily; and week after week,
weekly, we traversed the self-same longitudinal intersection
of the self-same Line; till we were almost ready to swear
that we felt the ship strike every time her keel crossed that
imaginary locality.
At length, dead before the equatorial breeze, we threaded
our way straight along the very Line itself. Westward sailing;
peering right, and peering left, but seeing naught.
It was during this weary time, that I experienced the
first symptons of that bitter impatience of our monotonous
craft, which ultimately led to the adventures herein recounted.
But hold you! Not a word against that rare old ship,
nor its crew. The sailors were good fellows all, the half-score
of pagans we had shipped at the islands included.
Nevertheless, they were not precisely to my mind. There
was no soul a magnet to mine; none with whom to mingle
sympathies; save in deploring the calms with which we
were now and then overtaken; or in hailing the breeze
when it came. Under other and livelier auspices the tarry
knaves might have developed qualities more attractive. Had
we sprung a leak, been “stove” by a whale, or been blessed
with some despot of a captain against whom to stir up some
spirited revolt, these shipmates of mine might have proved
limber lads, and men of mettle. But as it was, there was
naught to strike fire from their steel.
There were other things, also, tending to make my lot
on ship-board very hard to be borne. True, the skipper
himself was a trump; stood upon no quarter-deck dignity;
and had a tongue for a sailor. Let me do him justice,
furthermore: he took a sort of fancy for me in particular;
was sociable, nay, loquacious, when I happened to stand at
the helm. But what of that? Could he talk sentiment or
philosophy? Not a bit. His library was eight inches by
four: Bowditch, and Hamilton Moore.
And what to me, thus pining for some one who could
page me a quotation from Burton on Blue Devils; what to
me, indeed, were flat repetitions of long-drawn yarns, and
the everlasting stanzas of Black-eyed Susan sung by our
full forecastle choir? Staler than stale ale.
Ay, ay, Arcturion! I say it in no malice, but thou
wast exceedingly dull. Not only at sailing: hard though
it was, that I could have borne; but in every other respect.
The days went slowly round and round, endless and uneventful
as cycles in space. Time, and time-pieces! How
many centuries did my hammock tell, as pendulum-like it
swung to the ship's dull roll, and ticked the hours and ages.
Sacred forever be the Arcturion's fore-hatch—alas! seamoss
is over it now—and rusty forever the bolts that held
together that old sea hearth-stone, about which we so often
lounged. Nevertheless, ye lost and leaden hours, I will rail
at ye while life lasts.
Well: weeks, chronologically speaking, went by. Bill
Marvel's stories were told over and over again, till the
beginning and end dovetailed into each other, and were
united for aye. Ned Ballad's songs were sung till the
echoes lurked in the very tops, and nested in the bunts of
the sails. My poor patience was clean gone.
But, at last after some time sailing due westward we
quitted the Line in high disgust; having seen there, no sign
of a whale.
But whither now? To the broiling coast of Papua? That
region of sun-strokes, typhoons, and bitter pulls after whales
unattainable. Far worse. We were going, it seemed, to
illustrate the Whistonian theory concerning the damned and
the comets;—hurried from equinoctial heats to arctic frosts.
To be short, with the true fickleness of his tribe, our skipper
had abandoned all thought of the Cachalot. In desperation,
he was bent upon bobbing for the Right whale on the Nor'West
Coast and in the Bay of Kamschatska.
To the uninitiated in the business of whaling, my feelings
at this juncture may perhaps be hard to understand.
But this much let me say: that Right whaling on the Nor'West
Coast, in chill and dismal fogs, the sullen inert monsters
rafting the sea all round like Hartz forest logs on the
Rhine, and submitting to the harpoon like half-stunned bullocks
to the knife; this horrid and indecent Right whaling,
I say, compared to a spirited hunt for the gentlemanly
Cachalot in southern and more genial seas, is as the butchery
of white bears upon blank Greenland icebergs to zebra
hunting in Caffraria, where the lively quarry bounds before
you through leafy glades.
Now, this most unforeseen determination on the part of
my captain to measure the arctic circle was nothing more
nor less than a tacit contravention of the agreement between
us. That agreement needs not to be detailed. And
having shipped but for a single cruise, I had embarked
aboard his craft as one might put foot in stirrup for a day's
following of the hounds. And here, Heaven help me, he
was going to carry me off to the Pole! And on such a vile
errand too! For there was something degrading in it.
Your true whaleman glories in keeping his harpoon unspotted
by blood of aught but Cachalot. By my halidome, it
touched the knighthood of a tar. Sperm and spermaceti!
It was unendurable.
“Captain,” said I, touching my sombrero to him as I
stood at the wheel one day, “It's very hard to carry me off
this way to purgatory. I shipped to go elsewhere.”
“Yes, and so did I,” was his reply. “But it can't be
helped. Sperm whales are not to be had. We've been
out now three years, and something or other must be got;
for the ship is hungry for oil, and her hold a gulf to look
into. But cheer up my boy! once in the Bay of Kamschatka,
and we'll be all afloat with what we want, though
it be none of the best.”
Worse and worse! The oleaginous prospect extended
into an immensity of Macassar. “Sir,” said I, “I did not
ship for it; put me ashore somewhere, I beseech.” He
stared, but no answer vouchsafed; and for a moment I
thought I had roused the domineering spirit of the sea-captain,
to the prejudice of the more kindly nature of the man.
But not so. Taking three turns on the deck, he placed
his hand on the wheel, and said, “Right or wrong, my lad,
go with us you must. Putting you ashore is now out of
the question. I make no port till this ship is full to the
combings of her hatchways. However, you may leave her
if you can.” And so saying he entered his cabin, like
Julius Cæsar into his tent.
He may have meant little by it, but that last sentence
rung in my ear like a bravado. It savored of the turnkey's
compliments to the prisoner in Newgate, when he shoots to
the bolt on him.
“Leave the ship if I can!” Leave the ship when neither
sail nor shore was in sight! Ay, my fine captain, stranger
things have been done. For on board that very craft, the
old Arcturion, were four tall fellows, whom two years previous
our skipper himself had picked up in an open boat, far
from the farthest shoal. To be sure, they spun a long yarn
about being the only survivors of an Indiaman burnt down
to the water's edge. But who credited their tale? Like
many others, they were keepers of a secret: had doubtless
contracted a disgust for some ugly craft still afloat and
hearty, and stolen away from her, off soundings. Among
seamen in the Pacific such adventures not seldom occur.
Nor are they accounted great wonders. They are but incidents,
not events, in the career of the brethren of the order
of South Sea rovers. For what matters it, though hundreds
of miles from land, if a good whale-boat be under foot, the
Trades behind, and mild, warm seas before? And herein
lies the difference between the Atlantic and Pacific:—that
once within the Tropics, the bold sailor who has a mind to
quit his ship round Cape Horn, waits not for port. He
regards that ocean as one mighty harbor.
Nevertheless, the enterprise hinted at was no light one;
and I resolved to weigh well the chances. It's worth noticing,
this way we all have of pondering for ourselves the
enterprise, which, for others, we hold a bagatelle.
My first thoughts were of the boat to be obtained, and
the right or wrong of abstracting it, under the circumstances.
But to split no hairs on this point, let me say, that were I
placed in the same situation again, I would repeat the thing
I did then. The captain well knew that he was going to
detain me unlawfully: against our agreement; and it was
he himself who threw out the very hint, which I merely
adopted, with many thanks to him.
In some such willful mood as this, I went aloft one day,
to stand my allotted two hours at the mast-head. It was
toward the close of a day, serene and beautiful. There I
stood, high upon the mast, and away, away, illimitably rolled
the ocean beneath. Where we then were was perhaps the
most unfrequented and least known portion of these seas.
Westward, however, lay numerous groups of islands, loosely
laid down upon the charts, and invested with all the
charms of dream-land. But soon these regions would be
past; the mild equatorial breeze exchanged for cold, fierce
squalls, and all the horrors of northern voyaging.
I cast my eyes downward to the brown planks of the dull,
plodding ship, silent from stem to stern; then abroad.
In the distance what visions were spread! The entire
western horizon high piled with gold and crimson clouds;
airy arches, domes, and minarets; as if the yellow, Moorish
sun were setting behind some vast Alhambra. Vistas seemed
leading to worlds beyond. To and fro, and all over the
towers of this Nineveh in the sky, flew troops of birds.
Watching them long, one crossed my sight, flew through a
low arch, and was lost to view. My spirit must have sailed
in with it; for directly, as in a trance, came upon me the
cadence of mild billows laving a beach of shells, the waving
of boughs, and the voices of maidens, and the lulled beatings
of my own dissolved heart, all blended together.
Now, all this, to be plain, was but one of the many visions
one has up aloft. But coming upon me at this time, it
wrought upon me so, that thenceforth my desire to quit the
Arcturion became little short of a frenzy.
