At last, when the rowers felt as if their arms would drop off at the shoulders, the Captain’s deep voice was heard saying, ‘Peak oars, step mast, up sprit.’ These actions were immediately copied by each of the other boats, and, in three minutes from the time they had ceased rowing, the five boats, under the steady stress of their big sails, were bounding over the bright sea before the wind down on to the whales. The propulsion with the oars had only been resorted to for the purpose of obtaining a good weather gauge. That once reached, and the sails set, the boats’ heads were turned at right angles to the course they had been pursuing so that they might now, with the wind almost astern, run down upon the whales at high speed, and with the least possible amount of splash.
It was a splendid sight, that group of unconscious monsters calmly and methodically pursuing their way, quietly attending to their own business of procuring food and enjoying their life; and here, close at hand, stealing upon them like pirates upon a helpless merchantman, this little flotilla of destroyers. Each officer and harpooner was now in the throes of expectation, every nerve tense, all their hopes high that they would reach their prey before the periodical descent of the whales took place. In nine cases out of ten this would not have been the case, but here again, Captain Da Silva’s luck appeared to be in the ascendant, for, as if the boats were living creatures, full of eager desire to come to close quarters with the enemy, they leaped forward with ever-accelerating speed, until the foremost whale, a large bull of about seventy barrels (or, say, sixty feet in length) was only a couple of lengths ahead of the skipper’s boat. Hoarsely he growled, ‘Stand up, Jose!’ The harpooner’s crouching form straightened itself, and, raising the harpoon in both hands while steadying himself by his left thigh in the hollow of the clumsy cleat, he waited, a heroic figure, until, by a skilful sweep of the steering oar, the boat swung end on to the whale’s broad side, and struck it, at the same moment as the harpoon flew from those nervous hands and buried itself in the quivering blubber up to the hitches. Calmly pitching the stray line out of the box over the boat’s side, the harpooner turned to go aft with the face of a man knowing that his duty had been well done. Without taking the slightest notice of the writhings of the tortured leviathan so near or the tremendous commotion in the water, he superintended the rolling up of the sail, the unshipping of the mast, and the passing of it aft where it would be out of the way of the operations.