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Updated: May 9, 2025
It caused such excitement in the minds of the motley crew all of them suffering from extreme thirst that, without further hesitancy, they bent eagerly to their oars, putting forth the utmost effort of their strength in chase of the Catamaran. The Chase. Half pulling, half trusting to the sail, in a few seconds they were alongside the carcass of the cachalot.
During the preceding days they had so often made the passage from Catamaran to cachalot, and vice versa, that they could have gone either up or down blindfolded; and indeed they might as well have been blindfolded on this their last transit for the night, so dense was the darkness that had descended over the dead whale.
The ambergris may have proceeded from a sick cachalot that had wandered into the Mediterranean. The north-east passage around the north of Asia and Europe, which is adduced by the commentator, in Harris's Collection, is now thoroughly known to be impracticable.
The latter, as he had promised, soon made his meaning clear, by setting to work upon the carcass of the cachalot, and with less than a dozen blows of the sharp-edged tool hollowing out a large cavity in the blubber. "Now, Mass' Brace," cried he, when he had finished, triumphantly balancing the axe above his shoulder, "wha' you call dat? Dar's a lamp hold all de oil we want set blaze.
It was not a new discovery, for the sperm-whale or cachalot, had been known for years, but the great numbers of right whales and the ease with which they were taken, had made pursuit of this nobler game uncommon. But now the fact, growing yearly more apparent, that right whales were being driven to more inaccessible haunts, made whalers turn readily to this new prey.
In this was inserted with due care a quantity of the fibre, obtained by "picking" the old ropes into oakum. A crane was next erected over the cavity, a handspike forming one support and an oar the other. The crane itself consisted of the long iron arrow and socket of one of the harpoons found in the carcass of the cachalot.
But on board the CACHALOT I could get no information at all upon the habits of the strange creatures we met with, except whales, and very little about them. I have before referred to the great molluscs upon which the sperm whale feeds, portions of which I so frequently saw ejected from the stomach of dying whales.
As soon as he had steadied himself in his new position, a piece of rope was thrown up to him, by which Snowball was himself hoisted to the shoulders of the cachalot; and then the two seamen proceeded towards the tail, or, as the sailor pronounced it, the "starn" of this peculiar craft.
In like manner, it is of the deepest comfort to know that, storm or calm, fair or foul, the current of time, unhasting, unresting, bears us on to the goal that we shall surely reach the haven of unbroken rest. Not the least of the minor troubles on board the CACHALOT was the uncertainty of our destination; we never knew where we were going.
Ben only waited for the return of his breath; and as soon as that was fairly restored to him, he once more set about the design that had caused him for the second time to climb upon the back of the cachalot. Taking the harpoon from the hands of the Coromantee, who still kept clutching it, as if there was danger in letting it go, the sailor proceeded to draw up the drogue.
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