Twilight in the South 319 



The bosun was still bawling at the skipper of this vessel anent the 

 arrangement of the new whales when the real trouble began. Head 

 to the wind, the factory ship had begun to pitch lazily, her engines 

 turning just enough to give her way, but then something happened 

 that none, even among the Shelties, had expected. A gigantic rogue 

 wave came by across the sea and tossed the mighty vessel into a wild 

 roll just as if she had run aground on a mudbank. This caught a 

 group of flensers by the rail on the starboard side, smoking their 

 pipes and waiting for the lemmers to get their work done on whale 

 number one. Whale number two, ready to go through the gate to 

 the forward deck, was not anchored to the deck and, being bathed 

 in oil, blood, and grax, suddenly shpped, its seventy-odd tons com- 

 ing up against the gear to starboard with a sickening thump. By 

 what could only be regarded as a miracle, nobody was actually 

 killed, but some gruesomely mangled bodies, among them the head 

 flenser, were brought to light when the engineers finally grappled 

 the vast corpse and winched it back to the center of the deck. Then 

 the Corvette let out a wild bellow for help. 



The sudden and unexpected roll of the big ship had caught the 

 thin-skinned Corvette as she was backing alongside, without a whale 

 between her and the factory ship to act as a fender. The backwash 

 from the factory ship's mighty roll brought the Corvette against her, 

 broadside, so that the little vessel let out a report like gunfire, and 

 the big ship resounded like a drum. Something gave in the Corvette, 

 and by the time she recovered from her second roll, water was flood- 

 ing her engine room, from above. Then the final disaster occurred. 

 Until then, all that had taken place could be regarded as either a 

 normal hazard on a whaling expedition, or so odd as to be excusable, 

 but for this last catastrophe somebody was definitely to blame. It 

 was, after all, the ultimate sin of whaling. Three whales had broken 

 adrift. 



To the newsman who clung to the now heaving rail of the factory 

 ship, high above the afterdeck, what took place thereafter was be- 

 yond comprehension. In fact, he was momentarily convinced that 

 the mother ship was sinking and that the entire crew, including even 

 the Shelties, were panicking, and he got ready to leap for the near- 

 est life belt, though this would, of course, have been quite useless in 

 the towering, ice-cold seas that were by then roaring past the great 



