Bowhead whale

The schooner herself was not a bad-looking vessel, very seaworthy, and entirely fore and aft rigged, a surprising circumstance to me, as one always hears of whaling barks, that seeming to be an almost universal rig for the business.

I heard not long ago, as an evidence of the continued prosperity of whalers, that a Scotch bark, the Active of Dundee, last year cleared thirty thousand dollars in one very short voyage, having taken four tons of Greenland whalebone worth more than ten thousand dollars per ton, the voyage paying three hundred and sixty percent.

About four o'clock, Captain Thompson appeared on deck.

paid no heed at all to the monkey as he walked across the poop although pete missed the calf of his right leg by only one link of his chain and disappeared gravely over the side in ten minutes he stood on his own quarter-deck uncovered his head in a stately bow and then filled away standing to the northward if righteousness and humanity count for aught captain thompson ought to reach st michael's with his vessel full of ambergris we continued our scraping till supper-time when we wore ship and headed away on the starboard tack steering north-east by east showing that the wind is still ahead end of section two section three of a deep-water voyage by paul eve stevenson this librivox recording is in the public domain read by barry eads section three july eleventh another just such superb day as yesterday although the wind is still from the south-east after breakfast we laid the main yard aback and commenced the tedious task again this time scraping the port side of the bottom at eight o'clock the pearl nelson was five miles or so away on the lee beam and at noon the wind having freshened a little her trucks had vanished below the horizon late this afternoon i saw the most beautiful display of deep-sea fish that ever came to my notice having fallen in with a school of what sailors call dolphins many times i had heard and read of the great beauty of these inhabitants of the deep but what i saw astonished me beyond measure and as they are never met with on soundings the water is always of that marvelous ultramarine color only to be seen in the deep solitudes of the ocean and transparent as air so that nothing interrupts the vision and the slightest movement of a fish far below the surface is distinctly visible the colors of the dolphins were so exceedingly brilliant that one could with difficulty believe that they were living animals especially as all their rapid and graceful movements were made without the slightest apparent motion so fascinating a picture did they make that my wife and i could have watched them the whole afternoon had they not taken fright and darted away not to return even the gorgeous coloring of the angel-fish of the bahamas cannot approach that of the dolphin the skipper rigged a harpoon and struck two of them but did not get fast it seemed wicked to kill them and we would not have tried to do so except for the sake of a mess of fresh fish the flesh so it is said being very delicious it is curious i think that sailors should call this fish a dolphin for it certainly is not the true dolphin is generally about seven to eight feet long that is about the size of a porpoise has a flattened kind of beak instead of a mouth and a blow-hole and belongs to the cetaceans while the fish that we saw to-day which seafaring men call the dolphin looks something like a blue-fish except that the head forehead if you can call it that is very high and blunt sailors call the true dolphin bottle-nose we came very near having a tragic termination to the harpoon business the incident or accident happened while captain kingdon was trying to strike the second dolphin the manner in which he goes to work on such occasions is this after the harpoon has been rigged that is fitted with a wooden handle and a long line the skipper steps outside the poop-rail and stands on what is called the half-round that makes the poops of english ships something like a whale-back in order to have a better command over the harpoon and a clearer view of the fish to aid him still further the skipper passes the bights of a line around his waist belaying the ends to the rail or one of the pins and leans far out over the water so that he can see right under the counter captain kingdon was in his position and just about to hurl the iron when the rope which had been carelessly belayed slipped our hearts seemed to stop beating as the skipper fell backward but just as he was disappearing he caught the very bottom one of the rail stanchions and hung there until the steward and i hauled him aboard only a moment before i noticed a number of pilot-fish hovering about indicating the presence of sharks which would probably have made it unpleasant for captain kingdon had he fallen overboard this certainly is the region for beautiful sunsets and as we go farther south i understand that they increase in brilliancy we had a superb one to-night with wide bars of gold radiating from behind a vast black cloud we filled away at six and proceeded braced sharp up and as usual five points off our course july twelfth still the light weather holds on this day was even calmer than the previous ones and it makes the fifth day of headwinds last voyage captain kingdon took a strong south-westerly wind after leaving the gulf stream and held it to the thirtieth parallel almost until he took the north-east trades late in the afternoon a shark took the line that is always towing astern and instantly everything was excitement this line is what is known as a cod-line and is perhaps forty fathoms long ending with two strands of stout wire twisted together giving a total length of probably three hundred feet the method of ascertaining when a fish has taken the hook is simple and infallible a slender stick of wood is made fast in a vertical position to the poop-rail to the upper end of which is secured the cod-line which then passes inboard and well secured to a stanchion The result of this arrangement is that when a fish has been hooked, the slightest effort is all that is required to break the stick with a sharp snap.