b 



The Whalers : 209 



whales, particularly sperm whales, would dive. The problem then 

 was one of time and of how much line the sounding whale took with 

 him. 



Whale line was coiled into tubs to keep it neat and handy for use. 

 A full tub of %-inch manila whale line would be as long as 220 fath- 

 oms and some tubs held as much as 300 fathoms. The ends of the 

 line were always arranged so that another tub full of line could be 

 added, and sometimes several boats contributed their tubs of line to 

 take care of one sounding whale. One log book records that once, 

 in the Pacific, a sperm whale sounding ran out with four tubs of line 

 joined end to end (7,200 feet) and was still going strong when the 

 resources of all the whaleboats were exhausted, and the crew sat 

 dumfounded as the last bight of the Une flipped over the gunwales 

 and disappeared. 



Even if a whale did not circle or did not dive, even if it ran a true 

 compass course, the result to the whalemen was not always a huge 

 success. Often whaleboats were carried out of sight of the parent ship. 

 Sometimes, after killing a whale, they had to wait hours or days 

 before being picked up. Sometimes they were never picked up, and 

 instead, had to make their way over thousands of miles of water 

 before reaching an island or a seacoast. On a number of occasions 

 whales appear to have pulled boat crews across the horizon and into 

 oblivion. 



To have a whale overturn a boat or send it high in the air with 

 a flip of its flukes was a common occurrence. Occasionally a whale 

 would charge a boat head-on, splintering the boat and scattering the 

 crew in all directions. The sperm whale occasionally got a boat 

 between its jaws and mashed it to pieces, unfortunate members of the 

 crew also being mashed. On at least one occasion a whale chewed a 

 boat into two distinct halves, grabbed the mate in his huge jaws 

 and sounded. Other members of the crew, clinging to the wreckage, 

 thought this would be the end of the matter. Presently the whale 

 bobbed up again and spit the mate out into the mutilated bow of the 

 whaleboat. The whaler was stunned and badly battered but, after 

 a recovery period of several weeks, was hunting again from a new 

 boat. 



The whale was a large and tough adversary. He was capable of not 

 only knocking to pieces the light and frail whaleboats sent out to 

 capture him but also of creating trouble for whale ships and for other 

 ships too. A number of ships were sunk and lost because they had the 

 misfortune to run into a whale, unintentionally, some dark night. 



