"You damned mutton-headed ass!" he cried. "Do you want to send us all to the bottom? That's a _razorback_. He'll ram us, quick as hell, if we rile him."
The whale sank from sight as suddenly as he appeared, and, razorback or not, we had no opportunity to try his temper.
The sight of the whale started all hands forward looking for ambergris. This was described as a grayish amberlike substance to be found floating on the unsuspecting surface of the sea in large chunks of fortune, the finding of which would set a man up on a cosy farm for life, or enable him to see a snug retirement behind his own bar and beer kegs. Frenchy and Jimmy both had seen ambergris, and for a while regaled us with many tales of its origin, value and uses.
One of the results of the prospecting overboard for ambergris as we lazed along in the tropic seas of the Pacific was the better knowledge we obtained of the abounding life in the sea. In after years when at sea on the decks of swiftly moving steamers, I have often pondered over the sights that were given us of the queer inhabitants of the deep as we slowly worked our way across the ocean in the _Fuller_. From her low decks, when becalmed, or when sailing along at from four to five knots in fine weather, especially in the tropic seas, the teeming life in the depths below was brought very close to us.
The glint of queer fins, the vivid flash of some big fish rising near the surface in hot pursuit of prey, and the common sight of a school of flying fishes rising from the water just in time to miss the cruel jaws of their pursuers, gave us a faint idea of the ruthless rule of might below. Often the smother of white mist as the cloud of flyers would rise, and the swift black demons in hot chase under them, like avenging torpedoes tearing through the blue, would show glimpses of other and larger fish after the pursuers.
Time and again we would lie out on the martingale and look under the fore foot of the ship to see if there was a pilot fish around. These queer customers would swim along just under the stem of the ship, convict garbed, in thwartship black and white stripes, and about two feet long. The presence of a pilot fish under the bow was evidence of a shark under the bottom of the vessel, swimming along in the hope that something edible would be thrown overboard, or that the vessel would founder and disgorge her human freight into the deep.