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Updated: June 8, 2025
I had always figured the inside of the Pillar House as full of treasures, for they told tales of the old whaler's wealth. My prying eyes found it bare, like a deserted house gutted by seasons of tramps. A little fire of twigs and a broken butter-box on the hearth made a pathetic shift at domestic cheer. Minister Malden sat at one side of it, his back to me, his face half-buried in his hands.
When the rain fell in cascades the channel hardly contained the mad torrent that raced from the heights, a torrent that had destroyed the road built years before when whaler's ships by the dozens came each year. Now the natives made their way as of old, up and down rocky trails and over the stepping-stones.
Then, at the whaler's orders, the boat was swung round and the men held their oars ready to back-water. The place could not have been picked out with greater accuracy if the whaler had known the exact spot where the big cetacean was going to appear. Within thirty feet of the boat the water began to swirl and boil.
Night overtook us while we were engaged in the work, and watch and watch we continued it, lest a gale might spring up and compel us to abandon our prize before it was all secured. No scene could be wilder or more unearthly than that presented during the night by the whaler's decks.
I did succeed at last in putting together something in a remote degree resembling the boat that brought part of the whaler's crew to the island and had taken them away, but it was not a quarter the size, and was so light that I could carry it without much difficulty to the landing I had constructed on the cliff.
He looked at us savagely, singling out one of us to attack, and then rushed upon David; but the old whaler's lance was ready, and the bear received a mortal thrust in his breast. Notwithstanding this, he rushed forward grinning savagely; but David sprung out of his way, and another lance pierced him to the heart.
Had Father Vicentio been inclined to scoff at this apparition as a heretical innovation, there was still the story of Concepcion, the Demon Vaquero, whose terrible riata was fully as potent as the whaler's harpoon.
Some of the hands sprang into the rigging, too, and soon the whaler's battle-cry rang through the ship: "Ah-h blows! And spouts!" Captain Rogers was on deck in a moment. He ran up after Ben Gibson and took an earnest peek through the glasses himself. Then he dropped down to the quarter and said, but with satisfaction: "Only one fish in sight. May be more ahead.
* A colonial expression denoting heavy labour i.e., to work like bullocks in a team. When Denison reached the landing-place he was met by a number of the old whaler's whitey-brown descendants, who told him that Jack was dead had died three months ago, they said. And there was a letter for the supercargo and captain, they added, which the old man had written when he knew he was dying.
In spite of his profound intellectual growth away from the cool and humorous youth who paddled the Marquesan lake with primitive beauties beside him, he seems to have meant in "The White Whale" to go back to his earlier manner, to write an accurate though highly personal account of the whaler's life, and to that end had assembled a mass of information upon the sperm whale to add to his own memories.
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