110 WHALING 



thrust out over the edge, one with an eye-splice in it, to make it 

 easier to bend on with haste the second line that many boats 

 carried, or a line from a second boat, if a whale bade fair to ex- 

 haust the first line. 



One of the great dangers of whaling was a kink in the line. 

 There are innumerable records of lost limbs, or of men snatched 

 bodily out of whaleboats by a running line, some of them to be 

 found, hours later, dead in the hempen coils, others taken so 

 suddenly that their shipmates knew of their loss only when they 

 discovered their absence, and never seen again. Hence the 

 most scrupulous care was exerted to make sure that the fakes 

 should lie in exact spirals without wrinkle or twist. Melville 

 tells of harpooners who used to spend a morning coiling down 

 the line and who made sure that it was free of every twist by 

 carrying it aloft to reeve it through a block before bringing it 

 to the tub. 



The line itself was made of hemp in the old days, but later 

 of long-fibred manila, which is softer, more flexible, and, it is 

 said, stronger. It was loosely but carefully laid, and very 

 lightly tarred, since much tar would make it too stiff for its 

 purpose. Each line was between two hundred and three hundred 

 fathoms long. 



From the tub, the line led aft to the loggerhead, over which 

 it was given as many turns as the occasion might require. 

 Thence it led forward, passing always above the looms of the 

 oars and between the groups of three on each side of the boat, 

 to the chocks through which they rove it, drawing out a couple 

 of dozen fathoms to be coiled and laid in the box in the 

 bows. 



To the whale line were made fast two irons. These, in the 

 earher days of our whaling, as in the whaling days that preceded 

 our own, were of the conventional arrowhead shape. Of later 

 forms, I shall speak in the proper place. The heads of those 

 old irons were forged of steel; the shanks, of soft iron. Into 

 the hollow sockets were fitted rough handles of, say, hickory 

 with the bark left on it to give, by its roughness, a sure grip. 

 Round the shank, they spliced fast one end of a short piece of 



