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He told me in the course of the meal a good deal about himself; and it was interesting, his story. He was called Captain Adoniram Tugg, a Connecticut Yankee, and skipper of a two-stick schooner called the Sea Spell. He followed an odd business. He was a wild animal trapper, and gathered Natural History specimens of many kinds for museums and menageries.
Rather, I had a strong desire to see the man whom he called his partner the man who had given his name as Carver on the Sally Smith, but was now known to Tugg as "Professor Vose." I was in a fret of uncertainty. I shall never forget that evening as I sat beside Captain Adoniram Tugg on Maria Debora's portico.
"By the e-tar-nal snakes!" exploded Tugg, "it's a different kind of a sea-bat from anything I ever seed or heard of. You take it from me, that's a sea-sarpint, or wuss!" The whale was evidently at its last gasp when we left the schooner. It soon rolled over on its side. The mysterious flail stopped beating the huge body and the water seemed churned excitedly at the nose of the leviathan.
"Avast firin'!" roared Captain Tugg, and Pedro, the mate, repeated the order in Spanish. "Now out with a boat, Pedro, and save those canoes. They'll come in handy for our use." No matter what the situation might be, the Yankee could not lose sight of the main chance. We gathered in those canoes and then awaited daylight before we made any further move.
"That is, if the wind holds in the same quarter. You'll have a chance to see what sort of a good fellow the Professor is tomorrow." "What! are we so near your headquarters?" "That's the checker," returned Tugg. "Just a short sail now." The inlet was never more than a mile wide; in places the rocks crowded in toward the channel until a strong man could have flung a stone from shore to shore.
Tugg grew greatly excited, and ordered a boat lowered. We took four sailors and left Pedro in command of the becalmed schooner, and rowed off towards the scene of the battle between the whale and the mysterious fish. "It must be some kind of a huge ray," I suggested. "That's the tail that is being used like a club."
Spectre though the man was will-o'-the-wisp as he seemed I desired above all else to see and speak with this man whom Tom Anderly called "Carver" and Captain Tugg knew as "Professor Vose." If my father, Dr. Webb, was alive he would be a man with a mysterious past! I wanted to come face to face with this man whom Tugg said was so much like me.
But Captain Tugg assured me that in the fifteen years he had been in this country he had never been obliged to more than string a few savages up by their thumbs and ropes-end them! "They've been ugly at times not my boys around here, but some of the far, up-country tribes and I've been obliged to show them things. I'm kind of a wonder-worker, I be.
The Sea Spell had driven so hard and fast upon the shoal that she canted neither to port, or starboard. And although the sea was still so that she would not be beaten by the waves, it looked much to me as though she were piled up on this unfriendly coast for good and all! The bright light ahead had disappeared. Tugg was berating Pedro for getting off his course and running the schooner aground.
Up towards its head, on the port side, there appeared on the water a long tail, or fin, at right angles with the whale. "What in tarnation d'ye s'pose that critter is?" demanded Captain Tugg. The thing was all of four and twenty feet long, about two wide at the upper end, and tapering to eighteen inches.
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