While we were thus thinking during a brief pause to take breath, the old packet herself solved our last difficulty in emphatic fashion.She gave a tremendous lee lurch, which would inevitably have destroyed the cutting stage if we had not hoisted it, driving right over the head, which actually rose to the surface to windward, having passed under her bottom.The weather roll immediately following was swift and sudden.From the nature of things, it was evident that something must give way this time.
It did.For the first and only time in my experience, the fluke-chain was actually torn through the piece to which it was fast --two feet of solid gristle ripped asunder.Away went the head with its L150 to L200 worth of pure spermaceti, disappearing from view almost immediately.
It had no sooner gone than more sail was set, the yards were squared, and the vessel kept away up the Straits for shelter.It was a big improvement, for she certainly had begun to make dirty weather of it, and no wonder.Now, however, running almost dead before the gale, getting into smoother water at every fathom, she was steady as a rock, allowing us to pursue our greasy avocation in comparative comfort.The gale was still increasing, although now blowing with great fury; but, to our satisfaction, it was dry and not too cold.Running before it, too, lessened our appreciation of its force; besides which, we were exceedingly busy clearing away the enormous mass of the junk, which, draining continually, kept the decks running with oil.
We started to run up the Straits at about ten a.m.At two p.m.we suddenly looked up from our toil, our attention called by a sudden lull in the wind.We had rounded Saddle Point, a prominent headland, which shut off from us temporarily the violence of the gale.Two hours later we found ourselves hauling up into the pretty little harbour of Port William, where, without taking more than a couple of hands off the work, the vessel was rounded-to and anchored with quite as little fuss as bringing a boat alongside a ship.It was the perfection of seamanship.
Once inside the bay, a vessel was sheltered from all winds, the land being high and the entrance intricate.The water was smooth as a mill-pond, though the leaden masses of cloud flying overhead and the muffled roar of the gale told eloquently of the unpleasant state affairs prevailing outside.Two whale-ships lay here--the TAMERANE, of New Bedford, and the CHANCE, of Bluff Harbour.I am bound to confess that there was a great difference is appearance between the Yankee and the colonial--very much in favour of the former.She was neat, smart, and seaworthy, looking as if just launched; but the CHANCE looked like some poor old relic of a bygone day, whose owners, unable to sell her, and too poor to keep her in repair, were just letting her go while keeping up the insurance, praying fervently each day that she might come to grief, and bring them a little profit at last.
But although it is much safer to trust appearances in ships than in men, any one who summed up the CHANCE from her generally outworn and poverty-stricken looks would have been, as I was, "way off." Old she was, with an indefinite antiquity, carelessly rigged, and vilely unkempt as to her gear, while outside she did not seem to have had a coat of paint for a generation.She looked what she really was--the sole survivor of the once great whaling industry of New Zealand.For although struggling bay whaling stations did exist in a few sheltered places far away from the general run of traffic, the trade itself might truthfully be said to be practically extinct.The old CHANCEalone, like some shadow of the past, haunted Foveaux Straits, and made a better income for her fortunate owners than any of the showy, swift coasting steamers that rushed contemptuously past her on their eager way.
In many of the preceding pages I have, though possessing all an Englishman's pride in the prowess of mine own people, been compelled to bear witness to the wonderful smartness and courage shown by the American whalemen, to whom their perilous calling seems to have become a second nature.And on other occasions Ihave lamented that our own whalers, either at home or in the colonies, never seemed to take so kindly to the sperm whale fishery as the hardy "down Easters," who first taught them the business; carried it on with increasing success, in spite of their competition and the depredations of the ALABAMA; flourished long after the English fishery was dead; and even now muster a fleet of ships engaged in the same bold and hazardous calling.
Therefore, it is the more pleasant to me to be able to chronicle some of the doings of Captain Gilroy, familiarly known as "Paddy," the master of the CHANCE, who was unsurpassed as a whale-fisher or a seaman by any Yankee that ever sailed from Martha's Vineyard.
He was a queer little figure of a man--short, tubby, with scanty red hair, and a brogue thick as pea-soup.Eccentric in most things, he was especially so in his dress, which he seemed to select on the principle of finding the most unfitting things to wear.Rumour credited him with a numerous half-breed progeny--certainly be was greatly mixed up with the Maories, half his crew being made up of his dusky friends and relations by MARRIAGE.
