Louis Becke - John Frewen, South Sea Whaler

Captain Ethan Keller, of the Casilda of Nantucket, was in a very bad temper, for in four days he had lost two of the five boats the barque carried—one had been hopelessly stove by the dreaded “underclip” given her by a crafty old bull sperm-whale, and the other, which was in charge of the second mate, had not been seen for seventy hours. When last sighted she was fast to the same bull which had destroyed the first mate’s boat; it was then nearly dark, and the whale, which was of an enormous size, although he had three irons in his body and was towing the whole length of line from the stove-in boat as well as that of the second mate, was racing through the water as fresh as when he had first been struck, three hours previously. Then the sun dipped below the sea-rim, and the blue Pacific was shrouded in darkness.

“Why in thunder couldn’t the dunderhead put a bomb into that fish before it came on dark?” growled the skipper to his other officers, as they sat down to a harried sapper in the spacious, old-fashioned cabin of the whaler.

No one answered. Frewen, the missing officer, was as good a whaleman as ever drove an iron or gripped the haft of a steer-oar, and his half-caste boatsteerer Randall Cheyne was the best on the ship. But there was bad blood between young Frewen and his captain, and Cheyne was the cause of it.

“If they cut and lose that whale,” resumed Keller presently, “I’ll haze the life out of them—by thunder, I will, if I break my back in doing it! Why, that is the biggest fish we’ve struck yet. If I had been in that boat, I’d have had that whale in his flurry two hours ago. Why, it appears to me that Frewen got too soared to even try to haul up and give him a bomb, let alone giving him the lance—which was easy enough.”

Just as he spoke, one of the boatsteerers entered the cabin and reported that some of the hands thought that they had heard the second mate’s bomb gun.

“All right,” growled Keller, “tell the cooper to burn a flare.”

“I guess Frewen won’t lose him,” said Lopez, the first mate. “He told me long ago that he never yet had to out, and I don’t think he’ll do it now—unless something has gone wrong. That must have been his gun.”

“Huh!” sneered Keller, as he viciously speared a piece of salt pork with his fork, “we’ll see all about that when daylight comes. You’ll find Mr. Firwen and that yaller-hided Samoa buck back here for breakfast, but no whale.”

None of the men made any reply. They knew that Frewen would be the last man to lose a fish through any fault of his own, and only after carefully “drogueing” his line would he part company with it, and that only if the immense creature emptied the line tubs and “sounded.” Then, to save the lives of those in the boat, he would have to cut.

“Guess we’ll see that whale to-morrow, anyway, whether Mr. Frewen is fast to him or not,” said the third mate to the cooper, as they met on deck; “he’s got a mighty lot of line hanging to him, and, just after the second mate got fast I saw him shaking his flukes and trying to kick out one of the two irons the mate hove into him.”

“Well, that is so; I hope we shall get him. The old man is pretty cranky over it. He hasn’t a nice temper even when he’s in a good humour, and there will be blue fire blazing if Mr. Frewen does lose the fish after all.”

For four hours the barque made short tacks to the eastward, in which direction the boat had been taken by the whale. The night was fine but dark, the sea very smooth, and the flares which were burnt at intervals on board the barque would render her visible many miles away, and a keen look-out was kept for the boat, but nothing could be discovered of it.

Towards midnight the light air from the eastward died away, and was succeeded by a series of rather sharp rain squalls from the south-west, and Keller, fearing to miss the boat by running past her, hove-to till daylight.

The dawn broke brightly, with a dead calm. Forty pairs of eyes eagerly scanned the surface of the ocean, and in a few minutes there came a cheering cry from aloft.

“Dead whale, oh! Close to on the weather beam.”

“Can you see the boat?” cried Lopez.

“No, sir,” was the reply after a few seconds silence. “Can’t see her anywhere.”

“Look on the other side of the whale, you bat!” growled the skipper.

“She’s not there, sir,” was the reply.

“Lower away your boats, Mr. Bock and Mr. Lopez,” said Keller in more gracious tones to the third and first officers; “the second mate can’t be far away, but why in thunder he didn’t hang on to the whale last night I don’t know. Take something to eat with you. You will have to tow that whale alongside—this calm is going to last all day.”

Five minutes later the two boats pushed off, and then, as they sped over the glassy surface of the ocean and the huge carcass of the whale was more clearly revealed, Bock called out to his superior officer that he could see a whift 1 1 A wooden pole with a small pennon; used by whalers’ boats as a signal to the ship. on it.

Lopez nodded, but said nothing.

They pulled up alongside, and the mate’s boatsteerer stepped out on to the body of Leviathan and pulled out the whift pole, which was firmly embedded in the blubber.

“There’s a letter tied round the pole, sir,” he said to his officer, as he got back to the boat again and passed the whift aft.

The “letter” had been carefully wrapped in a strip of oilskin, and then tied around the whift pole by a piece of sail twine. It was a sheet of soiled paper with a few pencilled lines written on it. Lopez read it:—

“For the information of Ethan Keller, Haser: This whale was struck, for the sake of his shipmates’ lays, by Randall Cheyne, the ‘yaller-hided Samoan,’ who has struck more whales than old Haser Keller ever saw. If Haser Keller wants us he will find us at Savage Island, where we shall be ready for him.

(Signed) “R. Cheyne, Boatsteerer, “Casilda.”

“Where is Mr. Frewen, sir?” inquired the boatsteerer anxiously.

“Gone for a picnic,” replied the mate laconically. “Now, look lively, my lads. We’ve got to tow this fish to the ship and ‘cut in’ before the sharks save us the trouble.”

The quarrel between Keller, a rough, blasphemous-mouthed, and violent-tempered man, and his second officer had arisen over a very simple matter.

Frewen, one of the six sons of a struggling New Hampshire farmer, had received a better education than his brothers, for he was intended for the navy. But at sixteen years of age he realised the condition of the family finances, and shipped on a whaler sailing out of New London. From “‘foremast hand with hayseed in his hair,” he became boatsteerer; then followed rapid promotion from fourth to second officer’s berth, and at the age of five-and-twenty he was as competent a navigator and as good a seaman and boatheader as ever trod a whaleship’s deck. For like many a country-bred boy he had the sea instinct in his bones, inherited perhaps from his progenitors, who were of a seafaring stock in old Devonshire, in that town made for ever famous by Kingsley in “Westward Ho!”

When Frewen joined the Casilda , Keller had taken a great fancy to the young man, whom he soon discovered was a very able officer, and who proved his ability as a good whaleman so amply during the first twelve months of the cruise by never losing a whale once he got fast, that Keller, who was as mean as he was brutal to his crew, relaxed his “hazing” propensities considerably. The Casilda was always known as a “hard” ship and Keller as a “hazer”; but, on the other hand, she was also a lucky ship, and Lopes, the chief mate, who had sailed in her for many years, was a sterling good man, though a strict disciplinarian, and did much for the men to compensate them for Keller’s outbursts of savage fury when anything went wrong. So Lopez, Frewen, and his fellow-officers “worked” together, and the crew “worked” with them, and the Casilda became a fairly happy ship, as well as a lucky one, for Keller, after long years, began to realise that it was bad policy to ill-treat a willing crew who would give him a “full” ship in another six months instead of deserting one by one or in batches at every island touched at in the South Seas.