What the true inwardness of Captain Cushing’s desire of revenge on the spotted whale was we never rightly knew, but many rumours were current among ships that we gammed that he had, with his own hand many years before, killed the whale of a small pod, or company of whales, of which the spotted whale was the leader, and that they had met on several occasions afterwards, their meeting always being attended by some grave disaster to Cushing’s ship and crew. This had wrought upon his mind until it had become a mania, and he was willing to risk all for the chance of slaying his redoubtable foe. But we had no doubt that the whale was merely the instrument chosen by Providence for meting out to him a death he richly deserved for his many crimes.
Stories of the Sea have in my humble opinion been quite unfairly dealt with by the majority of their narrators. Told for the benefit of non-seafaring folk by writers, who, however great their literary gifts, have had merely a nodding acquaintance with the everyday doings on board ship, they generally lack proportion, and fail to convey to shore folk an intimate sense of the sea-atmosphere. Especially has this been so with books for young people, as was no doubt to be expected. So much has this been the case that sailors generally despise sea-stories, finding them utterly unlike anything they have ever experienced themselves. Of late years there have been some notable exceptions among sea story writers, most of them happily still living and doing splendid service. One cunning hand is still, that of James Runciman, whose yarns are salt as the ocean, and have most truly held the mirror up to Nature in a manner unexcelled by any other marine writer living or dead. Freedom from exaggeration, clarity of expression, and sympathetic insight into sea-life were his main features, and no one hated more than he the utterly impossible beings and doings common to the bulk of sea-fiction.
Whether it be from lack of imaginative power or an unfertile inventiveness I cannot say, but it has always appeared to me as if one need never travel outside the actual facts of his experience, however humdrum it may appear to the casual observer, to find matters sufficiently interesting to hold any intelligent reader enthralled, always providing that matter be well presented. And in that belief I venture to tell a plain tale here, into which no fiction enters except proper names.