Barney and the Secret of the Whales (2 page)

Captain Melvill hadn't left by the time the washing-up was finished and the kitchen wiped down and the dining room swept to Sally's satisfaction. I smelled pipe tobacco, out the back near the well.

Snake!

I scooted out the back door. ‘Sir!' I yelled.

‘What is it, boy?'

I looked around. No snake. ‘There was a snake near where you're sitting, just before dinner. Big brown one.'

‘They're poisonous?'

I nodded.

‘Did you chase it away?'

‘No, sir. You don't chase brown snakes. I just stood still so it couldn't see me. Snakes can only see you properly if you move. Then Sally shouted and startled it. But it could come back.'

‘I think I'll risk it,' said Captain Melvill, puffing on his pipe. It was a big black one, and put out great puffs of blue smoke. Some of the convict men and older women puffed on pipes, but not as many as back in England. Tobacco grew here all right, but the stores master said the leaves didn't dry well enough to smoke it. ‘You got good eyesight, boy?'

‘Yes, sir.' I had too. Lots of convicts here didn't see well at all, nor Ma either, which was why she had got that cut from an oyster shell that she'd died from.

‘Can you count the ships in the harbour from here?'

‘Yes, sir.' I glanced back onto the bouncing blue below us. ‘Eleven.'

‘And do you see any difference between the ships, boy?'

I squinted down at the harbour. ‘The
Britannia
and four of the others are whiter, sir,' I said at last. The
Britannia
looked almost like a skeleton of a ship it was so pale, but I didn't want to say that to its captain.

‘Aye. That's from the scrubbing. Whale oil is slippery, so the ship must be scrubbed, and the ash from the whale hide itself is the best soapstone of all. A few years of that and the wood is bleached white as you see it here. So you can see well enough to read her name, eh? Do you see aught else about her?'

I grinned at him. ‘Not unless I climb the tree to get a better view, sir.' Most of the trees in the colony had been cut down for their timber, but Mrs Johnson had made sure one big beauty had been left near our back door, so she could teach her classes there in the shade in summer.

Captain Melvill looked at the tree, and then at me. It had a trunk that went up thirty feet or more before it spread out its branches. ‘You'd need to grow a bit, lad, before you could reach those branches. Or fetch a ladder.'

I'd been hoping he'd think that. I found the first foothold in the trunk, then gripped it with my knees and arms, the way Birrung had taught me, and inched my way up. There were handholds if you knew where to find them. Captain Melvill was sure to be impressed.

I grabbed hold of the first branch and hoisted myself up onto it. ‘See, sir?' I called down. ‘Easy.'

He laughed. ‘I've seen monkeys that can't climb that well. What can you see now you're up there?'

‘A platform thing on deck, sir.' I squinted again. ‘It almost looks like bricks. And two things like big iron mouths.'

‘Ah, you do have good eyesight. Bricks it is: five feet of brick and mortar supported by great timbers underneath. You have to boil a whale down to get its oil. What would happen if you lit a fire like that on an ordinary craft?'

‘The ship would burn, sir,' I said promptly, then thought about the Indian women's fires in their canoes. But those were small fires, on green wet grass.

‘So our ship has a platform that doesn't burn. That's the tryworks. And those openings that you called mouths are mouths indeed: mouths for the whale skin. Those mouths are our furnaces and whale skin is what we burn. No ship can carry enough wood to boil down a whale. We carry a little to get the blaze started, but after that the whale itself provides the fuel for the process.'

He gazed out at his ship just like Mr Johnson looked at Mrs Johnson sometimes: a look of love that hurt your heart a bit. ‘I'll tell you what you can't see, lad. Timbers with whale teeth instead of wooden pins to hold them fast. A captain's chair up on that quarterdeck carved
from one great whale's jawbone — and its roof is made from whalebone too. Even the boat's tillers are made from whalebone. And down in the cabins there'll be harpoonists shaving before they come ashore. Do you know what they will be shaving with?'

‘Razors, sir?'

‘Harpoons and lances. Longer than a man and sharper than any knife in this colony. And each of them dearer to the man who wields it than his family. Those lances strike into the heart of a whale, but they hold the heart of the man who throws them too. There is no battle like that between man and the sea and the whale, lad. None.' He beckoned. ‘Come on down now.'

I shinned down the tree quicker than going up. Captain Melvill made room for me on the seat. He puffed on his pipe for a bit, then turned to me again. ‘You should see us boiling down a whale, boy. It's something no landsman could even dream about. Two great fires like the flames of hell, the smoke a black mist about the ship. And with every puff of smoke you know there's another barrel of oil being filled to make us rich.'

‘Are you rich, sir?'

I thought I might get a cuff on the ear for that. But he just laughed. ‘I will be when this voyage is through.
There are more whales in the Southern Ocean than we've ever seen up north. And no one knows they are even there, except a few of us who've made the voyage here or talked to someone who has. Those are the world's greatest whaling grounds, just there for the harvest. Every man who sails on the
Britannia
is going to go home rich.'

‘Every single one, sir?'

He nodded. ‘The ship owner takes his third, and I get a goodly portion too, and the harpooners. But there's wealth enough for us all, once we sail back to England with our hold full of barrels of oil. Whale oil, the best and cleanest fuel there is; rich man's oil, so his lamps don't smoke. And of course the whalebone — there's money in that too, though not near as much as in the oil.'

He looked out at the harbour again. ‘But it's not just the money, boy,' he said softly. ‘There's no life like it. You know who gets to breathe the winds first? Not the King of England. Us, out at sea. Men pitting themselves against the great beasts of the ocean and the great waves too.'

I could almost see it. The great whale rearing up, about to chew up the ship, men with swords and spears pursuing it, till the monster lay still, defeated.

‘Well, boy? Are you coming with us?'

‘Me, sir?'

He laughed again. ‘Why not? I'm offering you the best chance of your life to get rich. Probably your only chance. You sail for three years with us and you can stock that farm of yours. Build a big house.'

Be a gentleman, I thought. Me, Barney Bean, a gentleman. Mr and Mrs Johnson had taught me my manners and to speak properly and to read. All I needed now was money and I could be a gentleman.

‘I'm thinking that Governor Phillip will give grand land grants to those who've been whaling,' he said softly. ‘My business is going to make this colony wealthy.'

‘Wealthy? Sydney Town?' I looked at the huddled huts below us. Most were collapsing already, the cabbage-tree roofs rotting and the bark walls too. The colony wasn't starving, but we hadn't been far off it for a while. Most convicts still lived on gruel made from their rations. A colony of rags and pannikins the bloke next to you would steal soon as look at you.

‘Aye, rich. Whaling ships need food.' He waved at the vegetable garden behind me, the goats on their tethers beyond the orchard. ‘In a few years your sheep and cows and goats will multiply. And our whaling ships will buy your meat, and at good prices too. And your corn, and
timber. Down there?' He gestured at the straggle of huts along the harbour. ‘Within ten years there'll be quays and piers and merchants and ship chandlers supplying everything a whaling ship needs. But just for now,' he grinned, ‘the southern whaling grounds are secret. It will just be the
Britannia
and the four other ships that'll be harvesting their whales this year and the next. What do you say, boy? Are you sailing with us? Going to feel the green waves galloping like horses? Challenge the winds and the sea and creatures that make every building in this colony look puny? Will you make your fortune too?'