Kitabı oku: «Rídan The Devil And Other Stories», sayfa 8
THE ‘KILLERS’ OF TWOFOLD BAY
Enbosomed in the verdure-clad hills of the southern coast of sunny New South Wales lies a fisherman’s paradise, named Twofold Bay. Its fame is but local, or known only to outsiders who may have spent a day there when travelling from Sydney to Tasmania in the fine steamers of the Union Company, which occasionally put in there to ship cattle from the little township of Eden, which is situated upon the northern shore of its deep and placid waters. But the chief point of interest about Twofold Bay is that it is the rendezvous of the famous ‘killers’ (Orca gladiator) the deadly foes of the whole race of cetaceans other than themselves, and the most extraordinary and sagacious creatures that inhabit the ocean’s depths. From July to November two ‘schools’ of killers may be seen every day, either cruising to and fro across the entrance of the bay, or engaged in a Titanic combat with a whale—a ‘right’ whale, a ‘humpback,’ or the long, swift ‘fin-back.’ Never have they been known to tackle the great sperm-whale, except when one of those mighty creatures has been wounded by his human enemies. And to witness one of these mighty struggles is worth travelling many a thousand miles to see; it is terrible, awe-inspiring and wonderful. The ‘killer’ ranges in length from ten feet to twenty-five feet (whalemen have told me that one was seen stranded on the Great Barrier Reef in 1862 which measured thirty feet). Their breathing apparatus and general anatomy is much similar to that of the larger whales. They spout, ‘breach.’ and ‘sound’ like other cetaceans, and are of the same migratory habit, as the two ‘schools’ which haunt Twofold Bay always leave there at a certain time of the year to cruise in other seas, returning to their headquarters when the humpback and fin-back whales make their appearance on the coast of New South Wales, travelling northwards to the feeding-grounds on the Bampton Shoals, the coast of New Guinea and the Moluccas.
The head of the killer is of enormous strength. The mouth is armed in both jaws with fearful teeth, from one and a half inches to two inches long, and set rather widely apart. In colour they show an extraordinary variation, some being all one hue—brown, black, or dull grey; others are black, with large, irregular patches or streaks of pure white or yellow; others are dark brown with black and yellow patches. One, which I saw ashore on the reef at the island of Nukulaelae in the South Pacific, was nearly black, except for a few irregular blotches of white on the back and belly. This particular killer had died from starvation, for nearly the entire lower jaw had decayed from a cancerous growth.
The whaling station at Twofold Bay is now, alas! the only one in the colony—the last remnant of a once great and thriving industry, which, in the early days of the then struggling colony, was the nursery of bold and adventurous seamen. It is now carried on by a family named Davidson, father and sons—in conjunction with the killers. And for more than twenty years this business partnership has existed between the humans and the cetaceans, and the utmost rectitude and solicitude for each other’s interests has always been maintained. Orca gladiator seizes the whale for the Davidsons and holds him until the deadly lance is plunged into his ‘life,’ and the Davidssons let Orca carry the carcass to the bottom, and take his tithe of luscious blubber. This is the literal truth; and grizzled old Davidson, or any one of the stalwart sons who man his two boats, will tell you that but for the killers, who do half of the work, whaling would not pay with oil only worth from £18 to £24 a tun.
Let us imagine a warm, sunny day in August at Twofold Bay. The man who is on the lookout at the old lighthouse, built by Ben Boyd on the southern headland fifty years ago, paces to and fro on the grassy sward, stopping now and then to scan the wide expanse of ocean with his glass, for the spout of a whale is hard to discern at more than two miles if the weather is not clear. If the creature is in a playful mood and ‘breaches,’ that is, springs bodily out of the water and sends up a white volume of foam and spray, like the discharge of a submarine mine, you can see it eight miles away.
The two boats are always in readiness at the trying-out works, a mile or so up the harbour; so, too, are the killers; and the look-out man, walking to the verge of the cliff, looks down. There they are, cruising slowly up and down, close in-shore, spouting lazily and showing their wet, gleaming backs as they rise, roll and dive again. There’s ‘Fatty,’ and ‘Spot,’ and ‘Flukey,’ and ‘Little Jim,’ and ‘Paddy,’ and ‘Tom Tug.’ Nearly every one of them has a name, and each is well known to his human friends.
Presently the watchman sees, away to the southward, a white, misty puff, then another, and another. In an instant he brings his glass to bear, ‘Humpbacks!’ Quickly two flags flutter from the flagpole, and a fire is lit; and as the flags and smoke are seen, the waiting boats’ crews at the trying-out station are galvanised into life by the cry of ‘Rush, ho, lads! Humpbacks in sight, steering north-west!’ Rush and tumble into the boats and away!
Round the south head sweeps the first boat, the second following more leisurely, for she is only a ‘pick-up’ or relief, in case the first is ‘fluked’ and the crew are tossed high in air, with their boat crushed into matchwood, or meets with some other disaster. And as the leading boat rises to the long ocean swell of the offing, the killers close in round her on either side, just keeping clear of the sweep of the oars, and ‘breaching’ and leaping and spouting with the anticipative zest of the coming bloody fray.
‘Easy, lads, easy!’ says the old boat-header; ‘they’re coming right down on us. Billy was right. They’re humpbacks, sure enough!’
The panting oarsmen pull a slower stroke, and then, as they watch the great, savage creatures which swim alongside, they laugh in the mirthless manner peculiar to most young native-born Australians, for suddenly, with a last sharp spurt of vapour, the killers dive and disappear into the dark blue beneath; for they have heard the whales, and, as is their custom, have gone ahead of the boat, rushing swiftly on below full fifty fathoms deep. Fifteen minutes later they rise to the surface in the midst of the humpbacks, and half a square acre of ocean is turned into a white, swirling cauldron of foam and leaping spray. The bull-dogs of the sea have seized the largest whale of the school, and are holding him for the boat and for the deadly lance of his human foes. The rest of the humpbacks raise high their mighty flukes and ‘sound,’ a hundred—two hundred—fathoms down, and, speeding seaward, leave the unfortunate bull to his dreadful fate.
(And, in truth, it is a dreadful fate, and the writer of this sketch can never forget how one day, as he and a little girl of six watched, from a grassy headland on the coast of New South Wales, the slaughter of a monstrous whale by a drove of killers, that the child wept and shuddered and hid her face against his shoulder.)
Ranging swiftly alongside of him, from his great head down to the ‘small’ of his back, the fierce killers seize his body in their savage jaws and tear great strips of skin and blubber from off his writhing sides in huge mouthfuls, and then jerking the masses aside, take another and another bite. In vain he sweeps his flukes with fearful strokes from side to side—the bulldogs of the sea come not within their range; in vain he tries to ‘sound’—there is a devil on each side of his jaws, their cruel teeth fixed firmly into his huge lips; perhaps two or three are underneath him tearing and riving at the great tough corrugations of his grey-ribbed belly; whilst others, with a few swift vertical strokes of their flukes, draw back for fifty feet or so, charge him amidships, and strike him fearful blows on the ribs with their bony heads. Round and round, in ever-narrowing circles as his strength fails, the tortured humpback swims, sometimes turning on his back or side, but failing, failing fast.
‘He’s done for, lads. Pull up; stand up, Jim.’
The boat dashes up, and Jim, the man who is pulling bow oar, picks up his harpoon. A minute later, it flies from his hand and is buried deep into the body of the quivering animal, cutting through the thick blubber as a razor would cut through the skin of a drum.
‘Stern all!’ and the harpooner tumbles aft and grips the steer oar, and the steersman takes his place in the head of the boat with his keen-edged lance. But ‘humpy’ is almost spent, and though by a mighty effort he ‘ups flukes,’ and sounds, he soon rises, for the killers thrust him upwards to the surface again. Then the flashing lance, two, three swift blows into his ‘life,’ a gushing torrent of hot, dark blood, he rolls over on his side, an agonised trembling quivers through his vast frame, the battle is over and his life is gone.
And now comes the curious and yet absolutely truly described final part that the killers play in this ocean tragedy. They, the moment the whale is dead, close around him, and fastening their teeth into his body, by main strength bear it to the bottom. Here—if they have not already accomplished it—they tear out the tongue and eat about one-third of the blubber. In from thirty-six to forty hours the carcass will again rise to the surface, and as, before he was taken down, the whalemen have attached a line and buoy to the body, its whereabouts is easily discerned from the lookout on the headland; the boats again put off and tow it ashore to the trying-out works. The killers, though they have had their fill of blubber, accompany the boats to the head of the bay and keep off the sharks, which would otherwise strip off all the remaining blubber from the carcass before it had reached the shore. But once the boats are in the shallow water the killers stop, and then with a final ‘puff! puff!’ of farewell to their human friends, turn and head seaward to resume their ceaseless watch and patrol of the ocean.
The killers never hurt a man. Time after time have boats been stove-in or smashed into splinters by a whale, either by an accidental blow from his head or a sudden lateral sweep of his monstrous flukes, and the crew left struggling in the water or clinging to the oars and pieces of wreckage; and the killers have swum up to, looked at, and smelt them—but never have they touched a man with intent to do him harm. And wherever the killers are, the sharks are not, for Jack Shark dreads a killer as the devil is said to dread holy water. Sometimes I have seen ‘Jack’ make a rush in between the killers, and rip off a piece of hanging blubber, but he will carefully watch his chance to do so.
On some occasions, when a pack of killers set out whale-hunting, they will be joined by a thresher—the fox-shark (Alopias vulpes)—and then while the killers bite and tear the unfortunate cetacean, the thresher deals him fearful blows with his scythe-like tail. The master of a whaling vessel told me that off the north end of New Caledonia, there was, from 1868 till 1876, a pack of nine killers which were always attended by two threshers and a sword-fish. Not only he, but many other whaling skippers had seen this particular swordfish, year after year, joining the killers in attacks upon whales. The cruising ground of this pack extended for thirty miles, north and south, and the nine creatures and their associates were well known to hundreds of New Bedford whalemen. No doubt many of these combats, witnessed from merchant ships, have led to many sea-serpent stories; for when a thresher stands his twenty feet of slender body straight up on end like a pole, he presents a strange sight, as his long body sways, and curves, and twists in air, as he deals his cutting blows upon his victim. Then, too, the enormous length of the pectoral fins of a humpback whale, which show dazzlingly white as he rolls from side to side in his agony, and frantically beats the water with them in his struggles, or upends one after the other like a mast, might well be mistaken for the uprearing of a serpent’s body. But any South Sea whaleman will smile when he hears talk of the sea-serpent, though he has not forgotten the awe and fascination with which he was filled, when he first saw a whale in the agonies of combat with Alopias vulpes and Orca gladiator, and the serpentine evolutions of the former creature.
The whaleman in the Pacific sees very strange and wondrous sights; and never, since Herman Melville wrote his strangely exciting and weird book, ‘The Whale,’ nearly fifty years ago, has any writer given us such a vivid and true picture of whaling life and incident as Mr Frank T. Bullen in his ‘Cruise of the Cachalot published this year.
DENISON’S SECOND BERTH ASHORE
I have already told how Tom Denison, the South Sea Island supercargo, took a berth ashore as overseer of a Queensland duck farm, which was mortgaged to a bank of which his brother was manager, and how he resigned the post in great despondency, and humped his swag to Cooktown.
Over his meeting with his brother let a veil be drawn. Suffice it to say that the banker told him that he had missed the one great chance of his life, and quoted Scripture about the ways of the improvident man to such an extent that Denison forgot himself, and said that the bank and its infernal ducks could go and be damned. Thereupon his sister-in-law (who was a clergyman’s daughter, and revered the Bank as she did the Church) swooned, and his brother told him he was a heartless and dissolute young ruffian, who would come to a bad end. Feeling very hurt and indignant, the ex-supercargo stumped out of the bank, and went down to the wharf to look for a ship.
But there was only a dirty little coasting steamer in port, and Denison hated steamers, for once he had had to go a voyage in one as supercargo, and the continuous work involved by being constantly in port every few days, instead of drifting about in a calm, all but broke his heart. So he rented a room at a diggers’ boarding-house kept by a Chinaman, knowing that this would be a dagger in the heart of his sister-in-law, who was the leading lady in Cooktown society; also, he walked about the town without a coat, and then took a job on the wharf discharging coals from a collier, and experienced a malevolent satisfaction when he one evening met Mrs Aubrey Denison in the street. He was in company with four other coal-heavers, all as black as himself; his sister-in-law was walking with the wife of the newly-appointed Supreme Court judge. She glanced shudderingly at the disgraceful sight her relative presented, went home and hysterically suggested to Aubrey Denison, Esq., that his brother Tom was a degraded criminal, and was on the way to well-deserved penal servitude.
After the coal-heaving job was finished, Denison lay back and luxuriated on the £5, 17s. 6d. he had earned for his week’s toil. Then one morning he saw an advertisement, in the North Queensland Trumpet-Call, for a proof-reader. And being possessed of a certain amount of worldly wisdom, he went down to the bank, saw his brother (who received him with a gloomy brow) and said he should like to write a letter to the editor of the Trumpet-Call. He wrote his letter—on bank paper—and then went back to Sum Fat’s to await developments. The following morning he received a note from the editor telling him to call at the office. To Susie Sum Fat, his landlord’s pretty half-caste daughter, he showed the missive, and asked her to lend him one of her father’s best shirts. Susie, who liked Denison for his nice ways, and the tender manner in which he squeezed her hand when passing the bread, promptly brought him her parent’s entire stock of linen, and bade him, with a soft smile, to take his pick. Also that night she brought him a blue silk kummerbund streaked with scarlet, and laid it on his pillow, with a written intimation that it was sent ‘with fondiest love from Susie S. Fat.’
Arrayed in a clean shirt, and the swagger kummerbund, Denison presented himself next morning to the editor of the Trumpet-Call. There were seven other applicants for the billet, but Denison’s white shirt and new kummerbund were, he felt, a tower of strength to him, and even the editor of the Trumpet-Call seemed impressed—clean shirts being an anomaly in Cooktown journalistic circles.
The editor was a tall, stately man, with red eyes and a distinctly alcoholic breath. The other applicants went in first. Each one had a bundle of very dirty testimonials, all of which recalled to Denison Judge Norbury’s remarks about the ‘tender’ letters of a certain breach of promise case. One little man, with bandy legs and a lurching gait, put his unclean hands on the editorial table, and said that his father was ‘select preacher to the University of Oxford.’
The red-eyed man said he was proud to know him. ‘Your father, sir, was a learned man and I reverence his name. But I never could forgive myself did I permit a son of such a great teacher to accept such a laborious position as proof-reader on the Trumpet Call. Go to Sydney or Melbourne, my dear sir. The editors of all our leading colonial papers were clergymen or are sons of clergymen. I should be doing your future prospects a bitter injustice. A bright career awaits you in this new country.’
He shook the hand of the select preacher’s son and sent him out.
Among the other applicants was a man who had tried dugong fishing on the Great Barrier Reef; a broken-down advance agent from a stranded theatrical company; a local auctioneer with defective vision, but who had once written a ‘poem’ for a ladies’ journal; a baker’s carter who was secretary to the local debating society; and a man named Joss, who had a terrific black eye and who told Denison, sotto voce, that if the editor gave him any sauce he would ‘go for him’ there and then and ‘knock his bloomin’ eye out,’ and the son of the local bellman and bill-poster. The editor took their names and addresses, and said he should write to them all in the morning and announce his decision. Then, after they had gone, he turned to Denison with a pleasant smile and an approving look at Sum Fat’s shirt, and asked him if he had had previous experience of proof-reading. Denison, in a diffident manner, said that he had not exactly had much.
‘Just so. But you’ll try and do your best, Mr Denison? Well, come in this evening at eight o’clock, and see Mr Pinkham, the sub-editor. He’ll show you what to do. Salary, £2, 15s. Strict sobriety, I trust?’
The successful one said he never got quite drunk, expressed his thanks and withdrew. Once into the street he walked quickly into Sum Fat’s, and told the Celestial that he had taken a billet at ‘thirty bob’ a week on a newspaper.
‘Wha’ paper?’ inquired Sum Fat, who was squeezing a nasty-looking adipocerous mass into fish-balls for his boarders.
‘The Trumpet-Call.’
‘That’s a lotten lag, if you li.’ It close on banklupt this long time.’
Denison assented cheerfully. It was a rotten rag, he said, and undoubtedly in a weak position financially; but the thirty bob would pay his board bill.
Then Sum Fat, who knew that the ex-supercargo was lying as regarded the amount of his salary, nodded indifferently and went on pounding his awful hash.
‘Where is Mr Pinkham?’ asked Denison at eight p.m., when an exceedingly dirty small boy brought him his first proof.
‘He’s tanked.{*} An’ he says he ain’t agoin’ to help no blackguard sailor feller to read no proofs. And most all the comps is tanked, too.’
* ‘Tanked.’ A colonialism which indicates that a person has
indulged in too much liquid refreshment.
However, with the intelligent assistance of the boy, Denison managed to pull through that night, with the following result in the intercolonial Telegrams’ column:—
‘Melbourne, August 13.—The body of an elderly boat was foundd last night floating down the Yarra, down the Yarra, with its throat cut. It wvs dressed in v grey tweed suit with a flannel shirt, dressed in a grey tweed suit with a flannel shirt. This mourning a girl said the deceased was her father,’ etc.
A few lines further down in the same column was the intelligence that Chief Justice Higinbotham of Victoria had ‘sentenced the man Power to imprisonment for the term of his natural next.’
When Denison turned up next evening, the editor asked him in distinctly cold tones if he ‘had read the paper.’
Denison said he had not—he was too tired.
Then the editor pointed out twenty-nine hideous mistakes, all underlined in blue pencil and on a par with the two above-mentioned. Denison explained in regard to the word ‘next’ that he meant ‘life,’ but there being a turned ‘e’ in ‘life’ he somehow deleted the entire word, and just then in his zeal, calling out ‘next proof,’ he unthinkingly wrote ‘next’ on the proof instead of ‘life.’ As for the matter of the boat he had no excuse to offer. The editor was not harsh, but said that a man of Denison’s intelligence ought to be employed in building up Britain beyond the seas instead of reading proofs.
For the next two issues he pulled through fairly well. Sum Fat advanced him ten shillings, with which he bought Susie a pair of canvas shoes, and Susie kissed him seven times and said she loved him because he never said horrid things to her like the other men. And when she laid her innocent face upon his shoulder and wept, Denison was somewhat stirred, and decided to get away from Susie as quickly as possible.
On the fourth evening a beery local politician sent in a paragraph, written in an atrocious hand, stating that he (the beery man) had ‘received a number of replies to the circulars he had sent out to the supporters of the Government,’ etc. In the morning the paragraph appeared:—
‘Mr Ebenezer Thompson, the champion of Separation, for North Queensland, has again received quite a large number of reptiles,’ etc.
Of course Mr Thompson was terribly insulted—everyone in Cooktown knew that he had periodical illnesses, during which he imagined he was chased by large snakes joined to blue dogs with red eyes and crimson tails—and demanded Denison’s instant dismissal. The editor however, pleaded for him on account of his inexperience, and the matter was passed over.
He worried along pretty well till the end of the week, and then fresh trouble arose. Mr Pinkham the sub-editor, who did the foreign cables and the local fire-brigade items, got exceedingly drunk—a weekly occurrence—and, for his own safety, was locked up by the intelligent police. The three reporters, who all hated Pinkham, declined to sub-edit his cables, and consequently the editor was himself driven to take refuge in drink. The business manager, however, took his place, and told Denison that he relied on him to assist with the cables. Denison hinted at increased emoluments, and the manager promptly threatened to sack him and all the rest of the literary staff. He would do the cables himself, he said. He abhorred Denison on account of Susie and the kummerbund.
Just then the Emperor Frederick was dying at San Remo, and cables were coming through via Sydney.
At one a.m. the business manager came in to Denison and said that they should try to get along amicably. As both the editor and Mr Pinkham, he said, were in a disgraceful condition, he relied upon the rest of the staff to maintain the credit of the Trumpet-Call, etc. Then he showed Denison a cable he had just received, and asked him if he could assist him to make it out. It ran in this wise:
‘London—Emperor Frederick condition very grave. German physicians hamper Morell Mackenzie, but approve suggestion operation trache Otomy esophagus without delay.’
Denison said (with secret joy) that he was afraid he couldn’t help. But he believed that there were two world-famous Italian doctors named Tracchi and Tomy. ‘Esophagus’ was, he also remarked, no doubt meant for ‘sarcophagus’—the Latin name for the gullet. And he suggested to his enemy that it would be well to rush the cable through as quickly as possible. The business manager said he should—he merely felt a little doubt about the proper spelling of the Italian doctors’ names, though he, of course, knew that there was no such word as esophagus. As he went out Denison smiled like a fiend. His anticipations of an ample revenge upon the low, sordid creature who had refused him another sovereign a week were gratified in the morning, for under a large heading he saw this:—
‘THE EMPEROR FREDERICK
‘Serious Condition
‘San Remo.– The Emperor Frederick’s condition is causing grave anxiety. The German physicians in attendance hinder Morell Mackenzie in every possible way. They, however, agree to his suggestion to send for the two celebrated Italian specialists, Drs Tracchi and Tomy, and with them perform an operation on the Emperor’s sarcophagus. Wheat is 1d. firmer. Hides are dull, bank rate unaltered. Tallow is improving.’
The absolute beauty of the thing, however, to Denison’s mind, was that the business manager had sold a copy of his translation of the cablegram to the other local paper—run by the Cooktown Labour Union—which had used it word for word.
Nothing of moment occurred after this till a report of a sermon by Dr Stanton, the first Bishop of North Queensland, appeared. His lordship, alluding to certain conditions of the human mind which rendered one’s judgment ‘subject to warp and bias,’ the intelligent compositor made it ‘wasps and bees,’ and Denison, being very sleepy when he read the proof, let it go. And Dr Stanton, good and generous man, laughed heartily when Denison, with a contrite and broken heart called on him, and asked for his forgiveness.
But Nemesis was coming along. There was a wealthy and atrociously vulgar magnate in Cooktown, whose wife ran second to Mrs Aubrey Denison in local society, and who had just lost her father. The death announcement appeared as follows:—
‘On June 18, at the Bungalow, Cooktown, Donald Dugald M’Whannel, Government Inspector of Artesian Bores for North Queensland, aged sixty-five.
‘Also, at the same time and place, five trusses of Victoria hay, some pigs and calves, and twenty-six bags of onions and potatoes, all in prime order.’
Of course this was the last straw, and Denison was asked to resign. But as Mrs Aubrey Denison wrote and said she should like to forgive him for his disgraceful conduct before he went away, he sent the Scotch foreman of the Trumpet-Call to explain to her that the catch-line of an auctioneer’s advertisement had been ‘dropped’ on the same galley as the mortuary notice, and overlooked when the forme was locked. And so, after a tender farewell to little Susie Sum Fat, and with her kisses still warm upon his lips, Denison went out into the world again to look for a ship.