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Updated: May 17, 2025
The other members of the crew escaped the blow, and the harpooner managed to cut the line, so that for the present they were safe enough, clinging to the remains of their boat, unless the whale should choose to rush across them. Happily, his rushing was almost over. The bomb fired by Mr. Count, with such fatal result to poor Bamberger, must have exploded right in the whale's throat.
The liquor mounted in the heads of all of us, and the talk of Scotty and the harpooner was upon running the Easting down, gales off the Horn and pamperos off the Plate, lower topsail breezes, southerly busters, North Pacific gales, and of smashed whaleboats in the Arctic ice. "You can't swim in that ice water," said the harpooner confidentially to me. "You double up in a minute and go down.
Anyway, I climed up onto him, 'n bime-by the rest ov us histed themselves alongside ov me. Sam Weller here; he cum last, towin' you 'long with him. I don'no whar he foun' ye, but ye was very near a goner, 'n's full o' pickle as ye c'd hold." I turned a grateful eye upon my dusky harpooner, who had saved my life, but was now apparently blissfully unconscious of having done anything meritorious.
I remember hearing our first mate tell of a wonderful escape a comrade of his had in the Greenland Sea Fishery. A whale had been struck, and, after its first run, they hauled up to it again, and rowed so hard that they ran the boat right against it. The harpooner was standing on the bow all ready, and sent his iron cleverly into the blubber.
We contrived to get the "'vantage ground" by going to seaward of her, and by that means drove her into shoal water among the rocks. At last we came so near the young one, that the harpooner poised his weapon, knowing that the calf once struck, the mother was our own, for she would never desert it.
"Tertio," Conseil said, "the subbrachians, whose pelvic fins are attached under the pectorals and hang directly from the shoulder bone. This order contains four families. Examples: flatfish such as sole, turbot, dab, plaice, brill, etc." "Excellent, really excellent!" the harpooner exclaimed, interested in fish only from an edible viewpoint.
"They commanded me to go with them, and they were not kind in their commanding; and as I uprose, the head of the giant harpooner was rolled off my feet, past the edge of the mat, into the sand. He grunted like a pig, his lips opened, and all of his tongue rolled out of his mouth into the sand. Nor did he draw it back. For the first time I knew how long was a man's tongue.
By the position of the sun it must have been between ten a.m. and noon, and we, of the crew, had eaten nothing since the previous day at supper, when, as usual, the meal was very light. Therefore, I suppose we felt the chill sooner than the better-nourished mate and harpooner, who looked rather scornfully at our blue faces and chattering teeth.
Before they had done firing away, the gallant harpooner was so confused that he began to regard the whole case as already hopeless. The other men were much in the same condition; but in a private meeting held among themselves the day before the trial, Rokens made the following speech, which comforted them not a little. "Messmates and shipmates," said Tim, "I'll tell ye wot it is.
In consequence of there being none of the crew fit to take a harpooner's place, I was now really harpooner of the captain's boat, which he would continue to work, when necessary, until we were able to ship a harpooner, which he hoped to do at Hawaii. The news of my promotion was received in grim silence by the Portuguese forward, but the white men all seemed pleased.
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