05 Whale Adventure (2 page)

‘Here’s where you doss down,’ said the mate, indicating two bunks, one above the other.

Hal examined the bunks. The thin pad lay on wooden boards. There were no springs, no bedding, no pillow. ‘How about blankets?’ Hal asked. ‘Blankets! Man alive, this is the tropics. You’re lucky to get a donkey’s breakfast.’

Roger remembered the captain had said something about a donkey’s breakfast. ‘What’s a donkey’s breakfast?’ he asked. ‘This pad.’ ‘Why do they call it a donkey’s breakfast?’

‘I don’t know. Because it’s stuffed with straw, I guess.’

‘A pretty slim breakfast,’ said Hal, pinching the edge of the pad. It was not quite an inch thick. The boards would feel pretty hard through it.

‘Good for your back,’ laughed the mate. ‘Why, they tell me the best people sleep on boards these days. The doctors are all for it. ‘Course, nothin’ but the best would satisfy Cap Grindle.’ He laughed again. ‘The best boards, the best brig, and the best cat.’

The brig, Hal knew, was the jail, and the cat must be the cat-o’-nine-tails or whip used to flog unruly sailors.

‘You’re joking about the cat,’ Hal said. T suppose that isn’t used any more. The law doesn’t allow it.’

This struck the mate as very funny.

‘The law,’ he said, between gasps of laughter. ‘The law, you say! Believe you me, the captain makes his own law on this ship.’ He stopped laughing and his face suddenly took on a look of savage ferocity. In an instant he was changed from a carefree sailor into a snarling animal. He glanced up at the open hatch, then lowered his voice to a harsh whisper.

‘You may as well know about it now,’ he said. ‘You’ll learn soon enough. Why does ol’ man Grindle have trouble getting men? Why did those two desert? Why is he willing to take on greenies like you? Because he needs new feed for his cat, that’s why. Scarce a man on board who hasn’t felt it. Even the first mate - that’s why he quit. See here.’

He switched off his shirt. His back was ribbed with purple welts standing up a quarter of an inch high. At points the skin was still broken and festering.

‘But why do you stand it?’ asked Hal. ‘You could report it to the Honolulu police. Why don’t you all desert?’

‘Listen, chum, you don’t understand. We been out a year already from St Helena. We get no wages - just a lay - and that isn’t paid till we get home; Them as desert now lose everything they’ve earned. D’ye wonder a man thinks twice before he deserts? No, there are only two things we can do. One is to be patient-like till we get home.’

Hal waited for him to go on. When he did not, Hal prompted:

‘And what’s the other thing you can do?’

Durkins cast a look round at the empty bunks. ‘Walls have ears,’ he said. ‘And you have ears, and how do I know I can trust ‘em? What’s the other thing we can do? Use your imagination. No harm in that - but remember I didn’t say anything.’

Mutiny. The word stood out as plainly as if he had shouted it at the top of his lungs. Not for nothing had the boys read innumerable stories of mutiny on the high seas. Here conditions were prime for mutiny. The captain, without a first officer to back him up, stood alone against a disgruntled crew. If he were put out of the way they might sail the ship to some smugglers’ lair, sell the whale oil and the ship itself and divide the proceeds.

But could such a thing happen in this day and age? The boys knew it could happen and did happen. Even during their own brief voyaging of the Pacific, from San Francisco to Japan and back through the South Seas, several mutinies had been reported.

The Pacific, they knew, is a still unconquered ocean. It is bigger than the whole land surface of the globe. It is sprinkled with more than twenty-five thousand islands,

half of them uninhabited.

It is the paradise of both honest men and rascals. So much of it is so far from police stations and law-courts that men do as they please or as they must. And men who choose to disappear may hide in its vast distances more effectively than in the thickest jungles of Africa.

Hal reflected that this voyage might turn out to be even more of an adventure than he had expected.

‘Now I’ll show you topside,’ said the mate, and they climbed to the deck. The clean fresh air seemed like a tonic after the hot stink of the fo’c’sle.

‘You’ve got to know the names of things,’ said the mate, ‘so when you’re told to man the downhaul you won’t lay hold of a halyard, and all like that. Now then, you know the three masts - the foremast, mainmast, and mizenmast. The horizontal spars the sails hang from are the yards. When you roll up the sails that’s reefing ‘em, and you tie them tight with those little strings called gaskets -‘

He went on to point out and describe all the complicated gear of the most complicated of sailing ships -lifts, clews, bunts, braces, tacks, sheets, shrouds, ratlines, rings, crosstrees, foot-ropes, buoy-ropes, wheel-ropes, belaying pins, catheads, forestays, backstays, booms, sprits, davits, and so on and on, concluding with twenty different sails, each with its own particular name.

As he talked he kept glancing at them with a sly grin. He was having a good time at their expense. He thought they didn’t know what he was talking about. Finally he said:

‘There, I’ll bet you can’t remember half of what I’ve told you. What’s that sail?’

‘Spanker.’ The boys spoke together.

‘And that one?’

‘Gaff-topsyl.’

‘What’s the difference between a martingale boom and a whisker boom?’

He got the right answer.

He went on with a complete cross-examination. The boys made some mistakes, but thanks to their keen interest in sailing, their schooner experience, and much reading, their percentage of error was small.

‘Not bad,’ Durkins had to admit. Then, as if fearing that the boys might be too pleased with themselves, he went on:

‘But it’s one thing to name ‘em and another thing to use ‘em. Wait till you try reefing sails in a storm a hundred feet above deck - or rowing one of those little boats out and tackling a whale that can smash your craft to smithereens with one flick of his tail. Then you’ll find out what it takes to be a whaler.’

Roger floated above the clouds.

They seemed like clouds, the twenty white sails that billowed beneath him.

He was in the ‘rings’, a sort of basket or crow’s-nest at the top of the mainmast. A hundred feet down was the deck of the Killer, but he could not see it. He could see nothing below him but the white clouds of canvas. For a while he was alone, soaring through the sky like a bird or a plane, white clouds below him and more white clouds, real ones, above.

Not quite alone. One man shared his heaven. In the rings at the head of the foremast stood Jiggs, one of the crew. He, too, could not see the ship beneath. But he was not there to look at the ship. Both he and Roger were posted as lookouts to watch for whales.

There they stood, only thirty feet apart, but with an impassable canyon between them. It was as if they were each perched on a mountain-top separated by a deep valley filled with cloud. The cloud ended only a few feet below them and it was easy to imagine that you could walk across this white floor from the head of the mainmast to the head of the foremast. But when you remembered that the floor was not reliable and would treacherously let you plunge to your death on the deck a hundred feet below, it made your head swim and hands grip the rail of your dizzy basket.

Of course, it was the basket that was dizzy - Roger wouldn’t admit that he was. The basket was going round in circles. The sea was fairly smooth, but there was enough of a swell to roll the ship slightly from side to side and make it lazily heave and pitch.

Those on deck might not notice the motion, but a movement of a few inches there was exaggerated to many feet at the masthead. So it was that Roger was spun round and round until he began to have a distinctly uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach.

This was his first day of whaling. The Killer had left Honolulu at dawn. After their interview with Captain Grindle the boys and Mr Scott had gone ashore for their gear. There Scott had said goodbye to his colleague, Sinclair, who had been unable to go with him on the Killer because the captain had insisted that one ‘science fellow’ was enough to bother with. Hal and Roger had said their own goodbyes to their friends on the schooner Lively Lady, on which they had sailed the far Pacific. The schooner was still under charter by the American Museum, and the skipper, Captain Ike, and the Polynesian boy, Ohio, would look after it until the return of the Killer in three weeks.

The first night on board had not been too happy. The first surprise came at dinner-time.

There was no dining-saloon for the crew, not even a table. The men formed in line and walked past a small window in the wall of the galley (kitchen). Through this window the cook thrust out to each man a pan of meat and beans and a chunk of hardtack (ship-biscuit).

Then you could look for a place to sit down. Of course, there were no chairs. You might sit on the fo’c’sle head, or on a hatch cover, or on the deck itself.

Or you could eat standing up. This was not too bad because the eating did not take long. It was not the sort of food you would linger over. You got it down as fast as possible. In five minutes it was stowed away.

As for the hardtack, it was well named. It was so hard that the best teeth could scarcely make a dent in it, and most of the men threw their biscuits overside or tried to hit the gulls and terns that wheeled above the ship.

Having emptied their pans the boys were about to take them back to the galley when a sailor prompted:

‘Clean ‘em first.’

‘Where’s the water?’ Hal asked.’

‘Water my hat!’ exclaimed the sailor. ‘What do you think this is, a bloomin’ yacht? You’ll be lucky if you get enough water to drink - there’s none to spare for washin’.’

He pulled some rope-yarn from his pocket. It was a tangled mass almost as fluffy as absorbent cotton. He wiped his pan, then threw the sticky wad into the sea. He gave some of the yarn to the boys and they followed the same procedure. Then they returned their pans at the galley window.

‘You’ll soon get the hang of it,’ said the sailor who had supplied them with the rope-yarn. ‘My name’s Jimson. Any time you get stuck, perhaps I can help you out.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ said Hal, and introduced himself and his brother. ‘But I don’t understand it. Here we are still in harbour - there surely ought to be plenty of fresh water on board.’

“And so there is,’ agreed Jimson. ‘But you never know when you leave port on one of these sailing tubs how long it will be before you make port again. You’re pretty much at the mercy of wind and weather. ‘Course, you could fill up the hold with tanks of water, but then what would you do for space to store your whale oil? And, believe me, the skipper puts whale oil before water. Whale oil means money, water only means lives. If it came right down to it, I’m sure he’d rather have a few of us go raving mad o’thirst than crawl back into port with a light load o’ oil.’

‘But you must use water to wash your clothes,’ Hal said.

‘We do - but not fresh water. Come back and I’ll show you. There’s our clothes-line.’ He pointed to a coil of rope beside a barrel. ‘Once we get moving we’ll soak our dirty clothes in that barrel - it contains a weak acid solution - then we’ll tie them to the end of that line and throw it overboard. We’ll drag that bundle of clothes through the sea for two or three days, and when we haul it out I’ll bet the clothes will be as clean as if you had put them through one of those newfangled washing-machines. Of course, there may be a few holes in them where the sharks have closed then’ jaws on them.’

“Do the sharks ever tear them off that line?’

“No. One taste, and they let them go. That’s what usually happens. But a couple o’ months ago one fool of a shark swallowed the whole bundle. Probably there was some blood on the cloth that made him think it was edible. That shark must have been real surprised when be found he couldn’t get away. He was towed behind the ship nobody knows how long until someone noticed him floundering about and hauled him in. We opened him up and there were our clothes. They had to be dragged another three days to get the shark-smell out of them.’

The boys did very little sleeping that night. They could not make their bones comfortable on the hard boards of their bunks, and they were too excited by their new surroundings and the trip before them.

There were about twenty other men in the room, some trying to sleep, others sitting on the edges of their bunks talking and smoking. The smoke from their cigarettes and pipes, the fumes from the whale-oil lamps, the smell of blood and blubber and bilge-water - all this plus the heat made breathing difficult. The boys were not sorry when at four in the morning the second mate bellowed down through the hatch:

‘All hands on deck!’

In the grey light of dawn the Killer sailed from Honolulu. On the right lay Pearl Harbor, scene of death and destruction when Japan entered the Second World War. As if to balance this place of terrible memory, on the left was one of the loveliest and happiest spots in the world -the long curve of Waikiki Beach and bold Diamond Head wearing the pink halo of approaching sunrise.

Roger, standing by the rail enjoying the view, was roused by a kick in the rear that almost lifted him from the deck. He turned, fighting mad, clenching his fists for battle. The bulging eyes of Captain Grindle glared down at him.

‘I’ll have nobody loafing on this ship,’ growled the captain.

‘Sorry, sir, I was just waiting for orders.’

‘You’ll get your orders in the seat of your pants if you don’t step lively.’ He looked round with a sly grin. ‘I’ll find you something to do.’ He scanned the deck for a job that would be hard enough, something that would tax the strength and courage of a young boy. Finally he glanced up the swaying mast.

Roger hoped he would not be sent aloft. Not just now. Some other time he would like it, but now he felt a little faint for loss of sleep and his breakfast of overripe meat had not agreed with him. The captain seemed to guess the boy’s uneasiness.