Authors: Bryce Courtenay
The whaleboat is flying along and there is no turning back. Nestbyte will be drowned long before we can cut the line and return to search for him. Anyway, without oars, we have no way of rowing back to where he fell into the turbulent seas.
Nor do we have time to think about the whale. From a large artery at the junction of Hammerhead Jack's shoulder, blood is spouting to the beat of his heart.
I pull off my blouse, stained scarlet from the bull's blood now mixed with Jack's. What little I know of binding such a wound I have learnt only from a brief description in a book I once read about the Peninsular Wars. The wounds from a cannon shot cannot be much different to this one and though I am panicked, I try to recall the exact procedures advised. I cut and then tear some canvas into narrow strips and, taking twine from my pocket, cut a length and tie the pumping artery along with the smaller ones which are still bleeding.
Hammerhead Jack's arm has been torn clean out of his shoulder socket. This is fortunate as it means the socket hole is clean and the arteries protrude so the ties are easily made even though my trembling fingers are sticky with blood. Using the remainder of my blouse I make a pad to swab the socket hole and tie it as best I can to the unconscious man's shoulder by wrapping a strip around his chest.
I rinse my hand in the bloody water in the bottom of the boat and I see that my hand is bleeding from Nestbyte's knife wound. I look about me and see the weapon lying on the bottom of the boat where it must have fallen when Nestbyte did his fatal tumble. It is a handsome bowie knife, long-bladed with a fine ivory handle, the first mate's initials C. W. N. inlaid in copper. I put it in the stern, safe above the water.
I check the wrist of the Maori who hauled Jack and me into the boat, anxious to see if Nestbyte's blade penetrated through my own hand and injured him. But he shrugs and indicates a cut where the point of the bowie knife entered which has long since ceased to bleed.
'Good Ork!' he says.
It becomes clear to me what has befallen Hammerhead Jack. When the whaleboat overturned and we were caught under it, the whale line kinked and took Hammerhead Jack's arm with it, tearing it from its socket as the whale sounded.
It can only be supposed that the giant Maori, in the split second left to him, kept his nerve and hooked his good arm about the thwart. By holding on, he knowingly sacrificed his captured arm, else he would have travelled downwards with the whale to be drowned.
Still unconscious, Hammerhead Jack is now held by the eldest of the Maori, his head resting on the man's lap. The older man sits in the stern, his legs and most of Hammerhead Jack's torso submerged in the water-filled boat. He weeps as he tenderly protects Hammerhead Jack's damaged eye with his cupped hand. His tears spill down his purple-patterned face, splashing onto the unconscious giant's chin. All the while he moans and wails in a strange manner which I take to be the savage way of sorrowing.
The two other Maori, both younger men, have begun bailing water out of the boat with the piggin. Thankfully, this is always attached to the whaleboat by means of a marlin line and so was not lost when we overturned. They too are sniffing and moaning but remain busy at their task. They work hard and our risk of sinking diminishes as this wild sea ride with the whale continues unabated.
It is then that I see what has become of Hammerhead Jack's right eye. It is a terrible mash of jellied orb held by a tangle of bloody veins and sinew, now resting on the lower part of his tattooed cheek.
I have no time to think, or the task will be beyond me. Using Nestbyte's bowie knife I cut the tangle of sinew high up so the eye and socket entrails fall into his blood-soaked lap. Then with my thumb, I push what's left back into the empty cavity. There is now little blood as I pull the bruised and swollen eyelid over the mess. Hammerhead Jack looks to me to be more dead than alive, so I hope not to have done him much more harm than he has already endured.
I bend down and carefully scoop the eye from his lap and am about to throw it into the sea when the old man grabs my wrist and then cups his hands to receive the tangled mess. He calls his companions from their bailing and they stand beside him as he begins to chant in a wild high-pitched voice, the two young Maori punctuating the oration with great belly grunts, deep as a big military drum. Then, when the chanting is finally done, the old man leans over the side and submerges his hands to just below the water so that Hammerhead Jack's eye floats away into the waves as the three of them sing a strange but beautiful melody, filled with harmonies and a sense of great tenderness.
The whale has been forced by its bleeding to surface quickly and now is some distance ahead of us pulling the boat at a steady rate of knots. The mast has been snapped off by the whale-rope when we overturned, and the lug sail lost along with the oars and paddles, so we are captured, prisoners in our own whaleboat, tethered to a great sea beast which may eventually stop or simply continue onwards until the rope runs out. Either way, we are as helpless as small children lost in a snow storm on Cradle Mountain.
We have not had a drop to drink for six hours and before then only a mouthful. My head is light and the horizon dances in front of my eyes. Our hats were lost when the boat capsized and the sun will surely addle our brains.
*
After what seems like more than an hour, the rope slackens; the old bull turns and, in an arc, heads back in our direction. Now, I think, he has come at last to take his revenge. It is better so, more worthy that we should die this way than any other. We are done for anyway, there has been no sighting of the other boats or the ship and we are lost at sea. In an open whaleboat we will go through the night well enough, but we will not last long without water. Hammerhead Jack will be dead before the sun climbs to its zenith again and we who are left will not see too many sunsets after that. Better this quick death at the hands of a worthy foe than a slow and lingering one, lying cooked in the bottom of a whaleboat.
I think of my death, not in terms of my own demise, which is now certain. No, what worries me is the question of who will take care of Tommo. My thoughts go to him at this moment. Dear Tommo, who I think is slowly mending his ways - though he is winning too often at cards and the men are becoming suspicious. He has collected nearly twenty Yankee dollars and various rings, knives and scrimshaw as his winnings and he will even play for the raisins from their next ration of plum duff. I can only suppose he craves the sweetness for it is a most curious prize to win at cards.
I have told him his gambling must stop soon.
'If they catch you at cheating they will kill you, Tommo!' I plead.
'But I don't need to cheat with these duffers!' he protests, most indignantly. 'I swears it, Hawk! It is all done above board and on the square!'
I am unconvinced. But then again, it would be just like Tommo's luck to be killed at not cheating. What would our poor mama think?
No day has passed on our voyage that I do not think of Mary. What will become of her, on her own? I ache to talk to mama and I have written many pages of letters telling her of our adventures. But now she shall never receive them unless Tommo thinks to send them to her when he reaches port, and who knows what state he will be in then.
My heart is heavy for Mary and for Tommo as I prepare to meet my death. Not fifty yards from us, the great monster slows his approach and I see that his chimney is spouting thick black blood. We wait terrified - a dying whale is most dangerous until the final moment when he rolls over. The sperm whale has the largest brain of any creature in the universe and this old bull has no reason to spare us. As ninety feet and over seventy tons of malevolence bear down upon us, I can see from the sombre expressions on the Maori's faces that they too are aware of our approaching doom.
However, as we draw ever nearer, the creature seems unaware of our presence. We are now no more than thirty yards apart, with no means of controlling our path. The whale's giant mouth opens, blood falling like scarlet ribbons from his upper jaw, missing the great rows of teeth contained in the long, narrow lower jaw. This monster, should we come much closer, will crush our boat to tinder between those scrimshaw molars. Miraculously, the wind shifts direction a fraction and we drift a little further away again.
More than an hour passes in this way, as we drift in close proximity to death. The whale moves more and more slowly, his chimney frequently spouting blood and gore in a great scarlet spray. His flukes have grown lethargic, and they slap the surface, making no more sound than that of the wind snapping at bed-sheets on a backyard washline.
I think, after all, that our grand opponent is aware of our presence and, with none of his own kind around him, desires to be near us. This Prince of Fish does not wish to die alone. Ho, Great Fish! We will meet again at Neptune's tavern, for we will not be long behind you.
The sea about us is crimson, bubbling and seething for two hundred yards in the bull's wake. The blood pours from him like mud running down a mountain side after a storm. Sharks circle, snapping at the floating, bubbling gore, their fins cutting through the surface in ever increasing numbers.
Then, as the setting sun turns the western sky into a fiery blaze, and the sea grows so burnished the waves' reflections turn us into glowing red men, with a great roaring and sucking of water, the tormented beast rolls over, fin out. There is a sudden silence; the Prince of the Deep Waters is dead.
We are too tired for joy and must now pull the line in, a task which seems altogether too much for us. But we cannot risk drifting away in the dark and losing our line, for we count it safer to be tethered to the dead bull all night than drift helplessly at sea. If the Nankin Maiden comes a-looking in the morning, a dead whale will be easier to spot from the mainmast than a lone whaleboat lost at sea.
Though hope springs eternal, our rescue seems an unlikely event. With the three other boats having fastened onto the sperm cow, she was a certain capture. Captain O'Hara must tether her to the starboard of the ship, strip her of her blubber and boil it down for oil without delay. There is little chance that he will risk losing this valuable prize to come looking for us.
The supposition that an old bull sperm whale would prove too much for one boat to handle and the natural assumption following it, that we have perished under its flukes, is a most reasonable one. Our only hope is that we may be downwind from the ship so that sailing in search of us would not be an arduous task. It is to be hoped that the master places a great value on his first mate, Crawlin Nestbyte, for he would not search even to the bottom of a bucket of sea water for four kanakas and a nigger.
All the while the sharks have been gathering. They are now in their many hundreds, bumping their snouts against the belly of the whale and tearing upwards at his hide so that the old bull looks to be still alive but for the great fin sticking up into the air and the white patch now turned red on his underbelly. These jackals of the sea have the only true victory.
It is ended and, for what it is worth, we have won this bloody contest, even though the triumph of it will be shortlived before we die.
I sit upon a thwart, my hands dripping with fresh blood from hauling in the line, but I no longer care or feel the pain. It is almost dark, with only a sliver of the sun's brassy coin still showing above the horizon. I am weary beyond all endurance, yet there is something pestering at the back of my mind.
'Scratch around, look in the dark corners, clear the cobwebs, unlock the doors and open the windows, my dear,' I hear Ikey's voice say clearly to me. He would say this when I had lost track of an idea he had previously explained. 'If it is something you have thought or known before then it will still be there, stored in the old noggin box, to be retrieved when you should need it most. But when you look, my dear, do so in an orderly manner and all will be yours soon enough.'
So I go to thinking, letting this nightmare of a day pass once again through my mind and then, at last, I recall what it is that has been troubling me.
When I held Hammerhead Jack in the water and screamed to Nestbyte to cut the line, I swear I heard my own voice, not only in my imagination but out loud. Yet I know this cannot be. I have not uttered a single word since Mary rescued me from the wild man. I touch my throat, then swallow. It feels tender, raw, though this might equally be from lack of water during the long afternoon. Have my ears deceived me? I open my mouth to attempt to make a sound.
TOMMO
The Pacific Ocean
November 1856
If I've spoken against the God-gobbers what owns this ship, or Captain O'Hara, the master, I now hopes desperately that Christian fidelity might save me brother's life.
It's near sunset and the other three boats returned to the ship two hours ago with a sperm cow in tow. They says they saw Nestbyte and his crew attached to a monstrous sperm bull what they at once judged too much of a handful for a single boat. The whale were ninety foot if it be an inch, with a ton to every foot. They was all made fast to the cow and none could let loose to follow Nestbyte and his Maori, though all felt sure that the first mate would be forced to cut the manila rope or that it would run out soon enough. They was sure that the giant sea creature would not find one whaleboat much of a drag upon himself and would easily out-run the two hundred fathoms of harpoon line.
But now it's close to dark and Hawk's whaleboat still ain't returned. Most now believes that the bull's got the better of them. It ain't unusual, though, for a whaleboat to stay out overnight if another hour might bring the kill and the moon be bright enough to see by. There is fresh water on board and a lantern-keg with a little ship's biscuit and salt beef, even clay pipes and a quid of tobacco for comfort in the dark hours. But all this I'm told as the very tag end of hope by the second mate, Tom Stubbs. If they hasn't returned by sunset it is likely that the crew, including me brother Hawk, be lost at sea or dead.