All hands, therefore, worked like Trojans. There was no need to drive us, nor was a single harsh word spoken. Nothing was heard but the almost incessant clatter of the windlass pawls, abrupt monosyllabic orders, and the occasional melancholy wail of a gannet overhead. No word had been spoken on the subject among us, yet somehow we all realized that we were working for a large stake no less than our lives. What! says somebody, within a few miles of Hong Kong? Oh yes; and even within Hong Kong harbour itself, if opportunity offers. Let any man go down the wharf at Hong Kong after sunset, and hail a sampan from the hundreds there that are waiting to be hired. Hardly will the summons have left his lips before a white policeman will be at his side, note-book in hand, inquiring his name and ship, and taking a note of the sampan's number, with the time of his leaving the wharf. Nothing perfunctory about the job either. Let but these precautions be omitted, and the chances that the passenger (if he have aught of value about him) will ever arrive at his destination are almost nil.
So good was the progress made that by five p.m. we were busy at the head, while the last few turns of the windlass were being taken to complete the skinning of the body. With a long pent-up shout that last piece was severed and swung inboard, as the huge mass of reeking flesh floated slowly astern. As it drifted away we saw the patient watchers who had been waiting converging upon it from all quarters, and our hopes rose high. But there was no slackening of our efforts to get in the head. By the time it was dark we managed to get the junk on board, and by the most extraordinary efforts lifted the whole remainder of the head high enough to make sail and stand off to sea. The wind was off the land, the water smooth, and no swell on, so we took no damage from that tremendous weight surging by our side, though, had the worst come to the worst, we could have cut it adrift.
When morning dawned we hove-to, the land being only dimly visible astern, and finished taking on board our "head matter" without further incident. The danger past, we were all well pleased that the captain was below, for the work proceeded quite pleasantly under the genial rule of the mate. Since leaving port we had not felt so comfortable, the work, with all its disagreeables, seeming as nothing now that we could do it without fear and trembling. Alas for poor Jemmy!—as we always persisted in calling him from inability to pronounce his proper name—his case was evidently hopeless. His fellows did their poor best to comfort his fast-fleeting hours, one after another murmuring to him the prayers of the Church, which, although they did not understand them, they evidently believed most firmly to have some marvellous power to open the gates of paradise and cleanse the sinner. Notwithstanding the grim fact that their worship was almost pure superstition, it was far more in accordance with the fitness of things for a dying man's surroundings than such scenes as I have witnessed in the forecastles of merchant ships when poor sailors lay a-dying. I remember well once, when I was second officer of a large passenger ship, going in the forecastle as she lay at anchor at St. Helena, to see a sick man. Half the crew were drunk, and the beastly kennel in which they lived was in a thick fog of tobacco-smoke and the stale stench of rum. Ribald songs, quarrelling, and blasphemy made a veritable pandemonium of the place. I passed quietly through it to the sick man's bunk, and found him—dead! He had passed away in the midst of that, but the horror of it did not seem to impress his bemused shipmates much.
Here, at any rate, there was quiet and decorum, while all that could be done for the poor sufferer (not much, from ignorance of how he was injured) was done. He was released from his pain in the afternoon of the second day after the accident, the end coming suddenly and peacefully. The same evening, at sunset, the body, neatly sewn up in canvas, with a big lump of sandstone secured to the feet, was brought on deck, laid on a hatch at the gangway, and covered with the blue, star-spangled American Jack. Then all hands were mustered in the waist, the ship's bell was tolled, and the ensign run up halfway.
The captain was still too ill to be moved, so the mate stepped forward with a rusty old Common Prayer-book in his hands, whereon my vagrant fancy immediately fastened in frantic endeavour to imagine how it came to be there. The silence of death was over all. True, the man was but a unit of no special note among us, but death had conferred upon him a brevet rank, in virtue of which be dominated every thought. It seemed strange to me that we who faced death so often and variously, until natural fear had become deadened by custom, should, now that one of our number lay a rapidly-corrupting husk before us, be so tremendously impressed by the simple, inevitable fact. I suppose it was because none of us were able to realize the immanence of Death until we saw his handiwork. Mr. Count opened the book, fumbling nervously among the unfamiliar leaves. Then he suddenly looked up, his weather-scarred face glowing a dull brick-red, and said, in a low voice, "This thing's too many fer me; kin any of ye do it? Ef not, I guess we'll hev ter take it as read." There was no response for a moment; then I stepped forward, reaching out my hand for the book. Its contents were familiar enough to me, for in happy pre-arab days I had been a chorister in the old Lock Chapel, Harrow Road, and had borne my part in the service so often that I think even now I could repeat the greater part of it MEMORITER. Mr. Count gave it me without a word, and, trembling like a leaf, I turned to the "Burial Service," and began the majestic sentences, "I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord." I did not know my own voice as the wonderful words sounded clearly in the still air; but if ever a small body of soul-hardened men FELT the power of God, it was then. At the words, "We therefore commit his body to the deep," I paused, and, the mate making a sign, two of the harpooners tilted the hatch, from which the remains slid off into the unknown depths with a dull splash. Several of the dead man's compatriots covered their faces, and murmured prayers for the repose of his soul, while the tears trickled through their horny fingers. But matters soon resumed their normal course; the tension over, back came the strings of life into position again, to play the same old tunes and discords once more.
The captured whale made an addition to our cargo of one hundred and ten barrels—a very fair haul indeed. The harpooners were disposed to regard this capture as auspicious upon opening the North Pacific, where, in spite of the time we had spent, and the fair luck we had experienced in the Indian Ocean, we expected to make the chief portion of our cargo.
Our next cruising-ground is known to whalemen as the "Coast of Japan" ground, and has certainly proved in the past the most prolific fishery of sperm whales in the whole world. I am inclined now to believe that there are more and larger cachalots to be found in the Southern Hemisphere, between the parallels of 33deg. and 50deg. South; but there the drawback of heavy weather and mountainous seas severely handicaps the fishermen.
It is somewhat of a misnomer to call the Coast of Japan ground by that name, since to be successful you should not sight Japan at all, but keep out of range of the cold current that sweeps right across the Pacific, skirting the Philippines, along the coasts of the Japanese islands as far as the Kuriles, and then returns to the eastward again to the southward of the Aleutian Archipelago. The greatest number of whales are always found in the vicinity of the Bonin and Volcano groups of islands, which lie in the eddy formed by the northward bend of the mighty current before mentioned. This wonderful ground was first cruised by a London whale-ship, the SYREN, in 1819, when the English branch of the sperm whale-fishery was in its prime, and London skippers were proud of the fact that one of their number, in the EMILIA, had thirty-one years before first ventured around Cape Horn in pursuit of the cachalot.