The oriental spoon served very well when I finally did sit down at our charming table. My soup was good, but a little tepid in temperature, and I felt that Harry had been right in presenting the soup as hot as possible. The captain told me whimsically that the soup tasted better served in tableware of similar origin. Transported by the accouterments of exotica, I felt as though I were already experiencing China, though the captain said our longitude was about that of New York.
“Look yonder,” he said, gesturing toward the porthole. “It’s the Balance out of Bristol.”
I looked through the round porthole and saw the vessel in full sail, head-on, slender and leaning. Framed by the circle, it is my mind’s prettiest, most untroubled image of a whaling ship.
“The skipper is a drunk,” put in Chester.
Captain Fry looked at me and smiled. “From Samoa, he put out so drunk that he sailed the ship in circles. Tacked the ship some thirty times till she was like a duck going round in a puddle. He was out of his mind from drinking so hard, and so the crew took him back to Samoa, to the port of Apia. He and Captain Smith from New London had drunk two barrels of rum the few days before they set sail.”
I thought the Balance a lovely name for a ship; too bad the captain was so unworthy of her. I remarked that racehorses in Kentucky, like ships of all types, had beautiful names, and sometimes odd ones. “I knew of a horse,” I said, “named Beware-the-Demon-Drink. It was a filly and owned by a woman and her husband who believed in temperance.”
“Take the motto to heart, Billy,” Captain Fry said. I wondered if he could smell Harry’s muscatel on me. “Many a promising man has been ruined by drink.”
“Tell about Captain Swain,” Chester said.
This was a name that interested me, though I now knew that many a person from Nantucket was named Swain and it might not be Rebekkah Swain’s husband.
“Out of Nantucket, on the Globe,” Captain Fry began.
Again I thought it a lovely name, and remembering the captain’s book, I said, “Shakespeare’s theater was named the Globe.”
“How did you know that?” the captain asked.
I felt unveiled. I shrugged, dropped my head, and tried to look ordinary.
Getting no answer, the captain spoke again: “And, Chester, do you remember the name of Swain’s monkey?” But Captain Fry aborted the tale to get out his telescope and to report on another ship crossing the portholes.
“Out of Nantucket, the Pequod,” he said, “and Captain Ahab, I’ll warrant.”
I trained the spyglass as best I could. Uncle Torch had said they ruined the eyes and did not keep one at the Lighthouse, and, further, he said that he did not care to see farther out than nature had intended. But I was shocked at how the device made the ship in much detail appear before me. I reached out my hand as though to touch it and heard the captain chuckle.
“Everyone makes the same gesture,” he said, “looking the first time. Even a Shakespeare scholar. What do you see?”
“Ivory. Polished ivory hangs round the bulwarks. And she’s all fastened up with whale teeth for pins. Even the blocks for the tackle appear carved of ivory.”
“Let me see,” said Chester, and I handed him the glass. He ran to the second porthole to look. “There’s no wheel. They use an ivory tiller, and it’s the lower jawbone of the sperm.”
“The Pequod is called the cannibal craft,” the captain said.
I could see why, for she was all bones and teeth wherever such material could be used in place of wood. Her mien was that of a grinning, toothy jaw.
“It was Peleg decorated her thus, but Ahab likes it well enough.”
“Who is Ahab?” I asked.
I expected a jocular story, a narrative of drunken escapades such as that told of the captains of the Balance and the Globe, but Clifford Fry shook his head and did not smile. “They say he’s lived among the cannibals.”
“Fought the cannibals?” I asked timidly.
The captain said nothing else but shook his head in the negative and looked grim. “They say he’s been to colleges, too, as a young man,” he added. “Harvard and Yale.”
Those last names were uttered with bitterness, and I thought of the inscription in the flyleaf of his book, Shakespeare is my Harvard and my Yale. If Giles ever had to make such a statement, the list of authors would be very long, not confined to a single name, no matter how singularly worthy. I was troubled, as I pulled the bones from my fried catfish, that my perfect Captain Fry had in him an element of discontent, even of regret. I thought of Kit saying that he had been fascinated with the contentment he had found among us at the Island. How lightly I had thrown away content for adventure, but I could not imagine regret. And soon I would write letters explaining everything.
“What age man is Captain Ahab now?” I asked.
“Over fifty and still sailing. With iron-gray hair and the mark of lightning down his cheek.”
I went to Chester and took the glass from him. At the tiller, I inscribed Ahab, for surely it was he, his legs planted, his trousers rippling. Hatless, his gray-almost-to-white hair feathered in the breeze. All puissance, he held the ivory tiller against his hip, and it seemed to spring out from him like a third leg, a superfluous ivory one. I looked hard, focusing both my excellent natural eye and the extended one to see what expression figured the face of this associate of cannibals and colleges.
I saw there joy! Fierce joy and pride.
CHAPTER 31: Aloft
PEOPLE CROSS our paths casually, when trumpets should blast. So it was with my first sighting of the Pequod and the man who would become a husband. Had I met Ahab face-to-face and not across a wilderness of water with him all unaware that his face had become a cameo—had I done so my first days at sea, I would have had only a vague response. I was not then ready for Ahab. Yet, I did feel kin to him when I saw his exultation in wind and water and speed, his pleasure in his own preeminence. High in the Lighthouse, though motion lay around me in the wind, the traveler-clouds, the fluid sea, the pilgrim birds—there, close to the sun, alone, I myself had known strange joy and the strength that attends such joy.
He, too, has stood next to lightning, I thought, remarking the brand on his face. I touched my own cheek, glad that it was not marked, remembered Frannie, the permanent pitting of her face. Remembered my gratitude that my prayer for her recovery had been granted. My hope that she played contentedly. No. Frannie was lonely. And it was my fault.
Aboard the Sussex, we went on with our luncheon, and Captain Fry told me I should begin in the post meridiem to learn to climb the rigging. “We want to be able to send those fine eyes aloft,” he said, “safely.” Then he asked Chester and me what program we could devise to achieve that end.
The answer was as obvious to Chester as it was to me—that I should practice climbing to low altitudes and then, by degrees, climb higher.
“Mounting under full sail is quite a different thing from a climb in port.”
“You’ll be cold,” Chester said.
“And what’s the remedy—nay, the preventive?” the father asked.
Chester volunteered the use of his own thick peacoat, which was too big for him now. They had purchased it in anticipation of still being at sea some two years hence when Chester should have grown into it.
The coat was fetched, and it was large even for me. They must have prophesied prodigious growth for Chester. It was the most tailored and expensive garment I had ever put on—a thick, navy wool, top stitched on the collar, double-breasted, ornamented with a double row of brass buttons stamped with a smiling anchor. The lining was a slippery silk, also navy blue but figured with small gold anchors. I was profuse in my thanks and could not help but exclaim in ways that might have been considered girlish. But nothing was interpreted from my enthusiasm.
When I climbed, I required my arms to do perhaps more than their fair share of lifting my weight aloft in order to develop them. The muscles in my arms could not, of course, take on that defin
ition that is characteristic of males, but my arms did grow much stronger. The palms of my hands blistered and then callused. When I went to sleep at night I felt again the pressure of the ropes across the balls of my feet. After a week had passed, when we were skirting the wide Sargasso Sea in the regions of the Caribbean, I climbed, with the ship under full sail, all the way to the masthead.
The Sussex began to feel like home. For the most part, Kit and Giles had been avoided. I deduced that they had been given nightwatch duty, and that reduced the risk considerably of encountering them. Though I held no particle of anger toward them (for having neglected to call at the Sea-Fancy Inn in New Bedford), I found that I did not need them. Tucking into my own duties, listening to stories from Harry and the captain, tutoring Chester in a random, peripatetic manner, all this filled my hours in an interesting and comfortable way. Sometimes when I lay in my hammock at night, I thought about Kit and Giles, just as I did about my parents and my folk on the Island, but my friends seemed almost as remote to my present existence as my family. Should I ever become bored on ship, I decided, I would enliven my existence at that point by speaking with Kit or Giles. Yet, as I had told Chester upon meeting, I was a person very rarely bored.
I did learn that Harry had made the acquaintance of Giles, for Harry passed on sometimes the interesting things he had learned and his wonder at Giles’s wide reading. My own days fell out along these lines: breakfast and an hour’s walk with Chester; in the pantry with Harry preparing the noon meal; trips to the galley, where the food was cooked; my service and meal with the captain and sometimes the mates; the cleanup aftermath of lunch; tidying of the captain’s quarters, sometimes assisted by Chester (this seemed his only duty as cabin boy; his father attended to most of his own needs). My time aloft fell in mid afternoon.
“Aloft”
Surely it was the best time to be aloft. Especially as we sailed closer and closer to the equator, the air was so warm that I unbuttoned the peacoat and let the air bathe me. As the weather grew warmer and then hot, Harry moved his food preparation out of the pantry area and to the galley deck. Even the food for the captain and mates, who ate together now, was prepared there, and I took it below.
The possibility of sighting whales began to excite the atmosphere on board, and the sound of hasps honing the steel of lances and harpoons filled our ears throughout the day. Many a sailor sat on the deck, his back propped against any upright structure, his legs spread, and his whetstone moving back and forth against the edge of his harpoon, or lance, or cutting spade. These edges were stroked to the point of flashing silver, and all over the deck when I was above, I could see the short reflective dashline of a sharpened steel edge. High above the din, the sound put me in mind of a pack of demons patiently filing their teeth. Another lookout saw a whale, a right whale, and we gave chase, though the sperm whale was preferred. The beast escaped us. Nonetheless, the sighting sharpened the edge of excitement the way the whetstones sharpened the killing tools.
I once spied another ship in the offing and called down the news, but Captain felt we could not stop to gam until we had taken a whale. That night, I resolved, I would write my mother and my aunt the true story of my whereabouts.
For more than a month, we saw neither whales nor ships. We seemed suspended in time; our killing tools grew sharper and sharper.
CHAPTER 32: “Pardon Me”
PERHAPS I SHOULD admit that the prospect of actually harpooning a whale (though I was not assigned a boat), bringing it shipside, and butchering it appealed to me less and less. All the while everyone else grew more eager. Beginning to feel like an isolato in my new home, I tried to talk only to my most immediate “family.” When exchanges were required of me with the larger crew, I looked down and mumbled, hoping to make less of an impression that way. Once someone had said in a teasing way that rounding the cape would put hair on my chest and whiskers on my face, but Harry, hearing the remark, said sharply to let me alone. The cook is a rather placated member of a ship’s company, and Harry’s injunction was obeyed.
He had told me about the butchering, with language full of blood and gore. Harry spared no details: the peeling away of the blanket of blubber; the cutting of that into horse pieces in the blubber room, which was between decks in the waist of the ship; the mincing of the horsesized pieces into pages connected by a black spine of whale skin, these pieces being called “Bible leaves” because they were thin like pages; next the continuous pitching of the Bible leaves into the boiling try-pots. According to Harry, the stench was beyond description from the try-pots and also from the decaying animal, which oozed a black tar tracked all over the ship, the decks so oily and splattered with gobs of black blood everywhere it was difficult to walk.
Because we had been at sea a long time without taking a whale, all the mastheads were furnished with lookouts, and we took short turns to be sure our eyes were fresh. A whale ship being much overmanned in comparison to a merchant ship, there was no shortage of people to send aloft, though Captain was certainly as selective about the task as he could be. He seemed to feel that my eyes were both sharp and lucky, and often he would ask me if I felt like taking a second or third duty. Even my morning walk with Chester was shortened so that I might spend more time aloft.
Surely the captain could sense that I was reluctant to target a whale for butchering. Yet, he trusted me to do so, and, in good faith, I would not have let one of the brutes go his innocent way unheralded.
One other detail of life on the Sussex I feel compelled to mention—being on the subject of innocent blood—because it is never a part of men’s narratives, they having little reason to think of it. How did I manage my monthlies, since I did not dare to put my own bloody rags in a washpot? I had brought a supply of rags in my duffel, some of them left over from the cutting up of my eight-yard blue dress. And whenever there was any stray rag about the ship, I snatched it up and laundered it clean, then stowed it away against the time of the month when I should have need of it. My monthlies ran with the moon quite regularly, and when the crescent moon appeared over the masts, then I knew to look to my needs. Innovative Aunt had shown me how to contrive a kind of oilcloth diaper to hold my rags and contain any accident, so I never had the embarrassment of bleeding through on my outer clothing. As for my bloody rags, I simply crept out to the stern at night and tossed them overboard. It was a waste of good cotton cloth, but the public washpot was out of the question.
As for the innocent blood of the whale, it was, indeed, through my cry from the masthead, off the coast of Brazil, that the Sussex made her first kill of the voyage.
I did but do my duty.
I suppose many a soldier tells himself the same, and thus assuages guilt.
Having stayed aloft after my sighting, I was already sorry as I watched the lowering of our sixteen-foot whaleboats and the frantic chase with men bowing their backs so rapidly they seemed in danger of permanent injury. I watched the strange dance when the mate changes places down the length of the boat, grabbing heads as hand holds, with his harpooner, just as Chester and I had pretended by moonlight in the decked whaleboat.
The way the harpooner stood there poised to hurl at the gigantic animal reminded me of stories of knights and dragons—so unequally matched they seemed. But, as in the fairy tales of monsters and men, the man prevailed—in this case assisted by other men and his conveyance to the battle place first by mighty whale ship and finally by lesser whaleboat. But I do not think dragons drained such sad blood. Nor were dragons ever female, and this whale evidently was, for I saw her calf, who had been hiding under her like a dark chick, grow frightened and swim away.
At last Harry hailed me to descend. Before I did, I turned and looked straight across at the lookout in the next mast over. The tawny mountain-lion eyes of Kit locked with mine. He did not seem to recognize me, or rather, the recognition between us was focused on only the ungendered sadness that we saw in each other’s eyes. The whale discovered, his death was sure to follow. Had K
it, too, spied the whale, but chosen not to sound the cry? Already Kit anticipated that a bloody reality would replace his fantasy of whaling. We descended our masts at a parallel rate. When my feet touched the deck I quickly moved to the companionway and effected my disappearance.
My whale was estimated at sixty barrels. The labor of reducing, or literally rendering, the living animal with lungs and bones and heart and skin down to an essence of whale oil, stored in casks and barrels stacked in the hold of the ship, occupied us all, myself included, for two weeks.
What was my job in all of this? It was I who held the bucket when after the severed head of the beast was divided into the case and the junk, and after a hole was bored into the case, it was time to scoop out the clear, fine oil. It was I, posted with Chester in a whaleboat slung from the starboard quarter, who watched for particularly aggressive sharks. Yes, the sharks came almost at once. They watched the man on the monkey rope thread the heavy blubber hook into the end of the scarf that must be hoisted off and boiled for its load of oil. They watched his feet in particular, as we did, for he stood on the slippery carcass of the whale. The corpse was broader than the bole of the mightiest oak, but it was completely greased by the blood and slime exuded by the animal. And we watched the feet of the mates, too, who were all lined up on a kind of narrow stage pivoted down beside the animal. Standing on that board, they poked and prodded at the juncture between the detaching blanket piece, pulled up through the action of the windlass and chains, and the place where the layer of blubber still adhered to the animal.
And it was I, as well as other slight crew members, who kept empty tubs supplied at the edge of the hatch to receive the horse pieces cut in the blubber room. I watched those full tubs dragged to the mincing board to be fine-sliced into Bible leaves, the horse pieces dripping blood and oil set free by the between-decks heat trapped in the blubber room. Oil poured in fountains from the horse pieces and partly filled the tubs and dripped all over the deck.