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I tell you what, fellows, we're going to have no end of a good time here this summer with your band and all the ladies while you're roughing it out on the Big Horn. Whaling says he'll bet a hat none of you get back before Thanksgiving." "Is it so that Truscott comes here with his troop?" asked one of the captains of Lieutenant Crane.
"Yonder is father, and there is Uncle Mansie," said Jessie, as the two men climbed over the ship's rail and swarmed down into the boat. Then up went the brown sail, and the little Curlew sped blithely past the whaling ships and across the broad bay, and it was not long ere she was moored alongside our jetty and father stepped ashore.
And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab, all other whaling waters swept seemed to have chased his foe into an oceanfold, to slay him the more securely there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick; and now that all his successive meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man's eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see.
The mates, of course, and the boat-steerers, and also two or three of the crew, had been to sea before, but only whaling voyages; and the greater part of the crew were raw hands, just from the bush, as green as cabbages, and had not yet got the hay-seed out of their heads. The mizen topsail hung in the bunt-lines until everything was furled forward.
This was due entirely to the peculiar parsimony of our late skipper, who could scarcely bring himself to broach a coil of rope, except for whaling purposes. The same false economy had prevailed with regard to paint and varnish, so that the vessel, while spotlessly clean, presented a worn-out weather-beaten appearance.
He had persuaded himself now, as he had done often before, that what he had in reality done for his own pleasure or satisfaction, he had done in order to gratify some one else. 'The town was rough with a riot between the press-gang and the whaling folk; and I thought I'd best see Sylvia home. 'Ay, ay, lad; always welcome, if it's only as an excuse for t' liquor. But t' whalers, say'st ta?
The whaling ship had been gone to the Arctic ocean two or three years and had heard nothing of the discovery of the gold, and wonderful changes in San Francisco, and the captain thought he would put in that port on his return and hunt up his runaway sailor, and behold, his absconding sailor was rich enough when he found him to buy his ship and his whole cargo of whale oil.
Marble Island has been the winter quarters of whaling vessels for many years, though not altogether a safe harbor. In the winter of 1872 two vessels were wrecked here, the 'Ansel Gibbs' and the 'Oray Taft'. The hulk of the latter still lay upon the shore of the inner harbor, but the 'Ansel Gibbs' broke up outside and had long since gone to pieces.
At every station on the route he gave instructions to the telegraph operators to take off all whaling messages that passed over the wires to New York, and to inform their fellow-townsmen at what hour the whales would pass through each place.
The shore whaling parties at Twofold Bay, however, run no risks of this sort. They let their friends, the Gladiators, do most of the work, and find that "fin-backing" under these circumstances is fairly profitable, inasmuch as they can tow the carcase ashore, and "try out" the blubber at their leisure.
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