In spite of these capers, we managed to get the junk off the head. It was a tremendous lift for us; I hardly think we had ever raised such a weight before. The skipper himself estimated it at fifteen tons, which was no small load for the tackles in fine weather, but with the ship tumbling about in her present fashion, it threatened to rip the mainmast out by the roots—not, of course, the dead-weight strain; but when it was nearly aboard, her sudden lee wallow sometimes floated the whole mass, which the next instant, on the return roll, would be torn out of water, with all the force of the ship suddenly rolling the other way. Every splinter, every rope-yarn of her groaned again under this savage treatment; but so splendid was her construction that she never made a drop of water more than just sufficient to sweeten the limbers.
It was with great and genuine satisfaction that we saw it at last safely lowered on deck and secured. But when we turned our attention to the case, which, still attached to the skull, battered alongside, any chance of saving it was at once seen to be hopeless. Indeed, as the old man said, it was time for us to "up stick" and run for shelter. We had been too fully occupied to notice the gradual increase of the wind; but when we did, there was no gainsaying the fact that it was blowing a very stiff breeze (ANGLICE, a violent gale). Fortunately for us, it was from the westward, fair for the harbour of Port William, on the Stewart's Island side of the Straits, so that we were free from the apprehension of being blown out to sea or on a jagged lee shore.
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 TAMERLANE, 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 CHANCE alone, 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 I have 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 he was greatly mixed up with the Maories, half his crew being made up of his dusky friends and relations by MARRIAGE. Overflowing with kindliness and good temper, his ship was a veritable ark of refuge for any unfortunate who needed help, which accounted for the numerous deserters from Yankee whalers who were to be found among his crew. Such whaling skippers as our late commander hated him with ferocious intensity; and but for his Maori and half-breed bodyguard, I have little doubt he would have long before been killed. Living as he had for many years on that storm-beaten coast, he had become, like his Maories, familiar with every rock and tree in fog or clear, by night or day; he knew them, one might almost say, as the seal knows them, and feared them as little. His men adored him. They believed him capable of anything in the way of whaling, and would as soon have thought of questioning the reality of daylight as the wisdom of his decisions.
I went on board the evening of, our arrival, hearing some rumours of the doings of the old CHANCE and her crew, also with the idea that perhaps I might find some countrymen among his very mixed crowd. The first man I spoke to was Whitechapel to the backbone, plainly to be spotted as such as if it had been tattooed on his forehead. Making myself at home with him, I desired to know what brought him so far from the "big smoke," and on board a whaler of all places in the world. He told me he had been a Pickford's van-driver, but had emigrated to New Zealand, finding that he did not at all like himself in the new country. Trying to pick and choose instead of manfully choosing a pick and shovel for a beginning, he got hard up. During one of Captain Gilroy's visits to the Bluff, he came across my ex-drayman, looking hungry and woebegone. Invited on board to have a feed, he begged to be allowed to remain; nor, although his assistance was not needed, was he refused. "An nar," he said, his face glowing with conscious pride, "y'ort ter see me in a bloomin' bowt. I ain't a-goain' ter say as I kin fling wun o' them 'ere bloomin' 'arpoones like ar bowt-steerers kin; but I kin do my bit o' grawft wiv enny on 'em—don'tchu make no bloomin' herror." The glorious incongruity of the thing tickled me immensely; but I laughed more heartily still when on going below I was hailed as "Wot cher, chummy; 'ow yer hoppin' up?" by another barbarian from the wilds of Spitalfields, who, from the secure shelter of his cats'-meat round in 'Oxton, had got adrift, and, after being severely buffeted by tempestuous ill-fortune, had finally found himself in the comfortable old CHANCE, a haven of rest in the midst of storms. There were sixteen white men on board the CHANCE, including the skipper, drawn as usual from various European and American sources, the rest of her large crew of over forty all told being made up of Maories and half-breeds. One common interest united them, making them the jolliest crowd I ever saw—their devotion to their commander. There was here to be found no jealousy of the Maories being officers and harpooners, no black looks or discontented murmuring; all hands seemed particularly well satisfied with their lot in all its bearings; so that, although the old tub was malodorous enough to turn even a pretty strong stomach, it was a pleasure to visit her cheerful crowd for the sake of their enlivening society.