The Whale of Cobb's Island

The denizens of Cobb's Island have lately had a sensation beside which the largest wreck ever driven by westward winds upon the banks and shoals sinks into insignificance. It is something that will furnish them food for gossip for nine years to come, an unfailing topic for talk when conversation lags and silence becomes oppressive. Hereafter all dates will be fixed by the occurrence, and years hence the questions and answers will be something like this:

"Annie Maria, how old is young Elkenny Anderson Krump?"

"Oh, I remember now. He is three years and six months; born the day before Captain Spady tackled that whale. There's the date on the rafters where I put it with a piece of charcoal.

About that same period Albert Cobb goes over the island on business, for he farms on the mainland, and tells the boys that a ship has run ashore on the bar about ten miles away, and proposes for them to go and try to save the cargo.

"Count me out," growled out old Captain Cornell, "what's the sense of saving it? Them owners is going for to beat us out of our price, and if the crew's safe let her sink."

"Them's my sentiments exactly," put in Warren Cobb.

"I'll be club-hauled fore and aft before I risk my life and work myself to death to save a cargo that won't be paid for. Here I is, and here I stays."

"I swore," said Captain Spady, three years ago, "if I wasn't paid for the last job I'd throw up my hands, burn my boats, and let them that owns the cargo save it."

"How long ago was it that we saved that vessel off Shell Island."

"Somew'ars 'bout four years," spoke up one.

"Not over three." said another.

"I'll tell you, boys, it was only four days 'fore Captain Spady tackled that 'ere whale."

"Lord, Lord! them was rum times," spoke up Nathan Cobb, who was setting in a corner. "It was three years and leetle over six months ago. How time do fly."

The true history of the fight with the great Arctic whale, as near as I can get at it, and as told without contradiction by the different members of the attacking crew is as follows:

It seems that about three o'clock one afternoon in the first part of February of this year, Jack Andrews, a resident of the place, was gathering oysters, when casting his eyes carelessly around, he saw a huge black spot, like the bottom of a long boat turned upside down, on the bar about two miles from the island. He gave the alarm, and Nathan, scanning the object with his field telescope, said with an intense excitement that rarely found lodgment in his phlegmatic nature:

"Boyst, it is a big sperm whale stranded on the sand-bar, and is worth a cool thousand if we can capture it."

The effect was electrical; the island was in an uproar. Tom Spady, who was sitting down with a twin, aged two years, on each knee, surveying their features with paternal pride, and trying if he could tell one from another, as soon as he heard the news jumped to his fee, and the twins fell to the floor and on their heads, but as they inherited their cranium from their father -- which was the hardest part of the Spadys, old and young -- each little chip off the ancient block only sat up a rival solo, which speedily brought Mrs. Spady to the scene. In one swoop she gathered the pair in her lap. "Poor little dears; don't cry, both will be well before you're married;" and she rubbed the bumps. Oh, magical words! that have been used with effect by our grandmothers' great grandmothers. In those simple combination of letters how much cogent puissant power lies hid; infant tears are dried, infant sobs are checked, and the new tooth just cut is displayed in an infantile grin.

"Mr. Spady," indignantly, from the matron, "you ought to be ashamed to treat your own flesh and blood so."

"Oh, bother; there's a whale on the coast." And forgetting his wife, baby and twins, Tom Spady rushed to the wharf.

A motley crowd, roused from their avocations, was there. Bill Johns, just bolted from a quiet game of draw, held in his paw a full hand, that he hadn't time in his excitement to call and claim the stakes, when the news came, and which he had forgotten to leave behind. On Captain Crump's arm was a long hank of yarn, showing that he had been helping his spouse.

In a few minutes the large lifeboat was manned by a half dozen volunteers, and with Nathan Cobb and Captain Spady as joint commanders, who sat in the bow, the craft was soon speeding towards the place where the whale lay, like the armored back of some deadly Merrimac or ironplated monitor.

Now there are three kinds of whales; one the Baloenidoe or baleen, of which there are to species, the fin-back and the rorqual whale; the second Physeteridoe or sperm whale, and the third the Delphnidoe which last comprised the grampus, dolphins and porpoises and marwhals. The first two are of vast size, averaging between seventy and eighty feet; their mouths are fifteen to eighteen feet long and from six to eight feet wide, and ten to twelve feet high, presenting a semoid curve when shut. Their ordinary rate of speed is four to five miles an hour. They swim not far beneath the surface, and sometimes throw themselves in sport entirely out of the water. They usually come up every ten minutes, but can remain down half an hour or more. They generally keep on the surface about two minutes, during which time they blow eight or nine times and then descend. They feed just below the surface with their mouth wide open. The baleen whales has two blow holes.

The sperm whale is smaller but is more valuable. Both kinds are found in all seas, but the former are most abundant in the waters of the Pacific and the Arctic Ocean, and especially along the shores of Spitzbergen. They are very valuable; as much as eighty to ninety barrels of oil being taken from a single individual, besides the spermaceti which often weighs a ton. In addition is found in the whale that precious perfume known as ambergris for which wholesale druggists often pay five golden dollars an ounce.

This is science and facts, reader, and though the wreckers didn't know all this, yet their intuition told them that a rich prize lay helpless on the reef, and they determined to get him if they could. And so the willing crew sprung to their oars and made the boat fairly fly through the water. They soon reached him and then they took in the situation of the captive at a glance. It appeared that the huge baleen, one of the largest of its kind and measuring fully seventy feet, had, in its sportive rush thorough the ocean, run on a sand bar that projects out from Cobb's Island, or rather encircled it for several miles. Between this bar and the beach there is a narrow tortuous channel of several miles that leads out to the ocean. The whale lay fast aground on the bar, and as evidence of its vast size it had stranded in twelve feet of water which was measured by Nathan Cobb himself.

The boat glided to within five feet of the monster of the deep. Only the top of his head and his back was visible, a round, shiny, smooth black surface that was as slick as a dressed hog. A council of war was held. There's your fish; how are you going to get him. Captain Spady spoke up: "Drive two fence rails sharpened at the end down his spout holes and thus suffocate him."

"My plan," said Nathan Cobb, "is to shoot him. I have my No. 4 ducking gun and No. 1 shot. I think I may kill him by shooting a dozen times in one hole."

"My plan," said the ancient Captain Cornell -- who, by the way, is an old Martha Vineyard sailor, a veteran of many a battle with the seas and now feeble with age (he spends his winters at Cobb's, duck shooting) -- "my plan," he iterated, "is to cut a hole in his back with an axe, and then run a stake clean through him."

Of course any one reading this will ask why they did not harpoon him. Well, because there was neither lance nor harpoon on the island, nor had any whale, in the memory of man, ever grounded near the island before. So these men had hastily thrown such articles in the boat as they first laid their hands upon; indeed, they had no time to spare, for the tide, at its lowest ebb when the whale was first discovered, now began slowly to rise; and moments are as precious to them as time was to the Iron Duke when the French cuirassiers and chasseurs came in hammering onsets against his enfeebled line, and he counted each second by a heart throb as he gazed on the road to the left, hoping to see the head of the Prussian Ziethen's columns appear.

Unless the whale was killed before the flood tide he was lost.

Nathan Cobb began the fight. Standing up in the bow of the boat, he put the muzzle of his heavy gun within two feet of the back, and pulled trigger. Two thundering reports echoed across the waves. The mighty leviathan of the deep merely waved his tail like a dog when his ears are scratched, or as a cat when its fur is rubbed. Again, again and yet again did Nathan send the buckshot into the mass; but the blubber, which was some four feet deep, absorbed the shot, and probably did not worry him any more than a sand fly would a hippopotamus.

Next Tom Spady's device was attempted. The sharpened stake was thrust in the spout hole, but the united force of three men could not hold it in. One breath of the huge fish was like a blast from a volcano, and mocked the puny strength of man; the stakes would be hurled twenty feet high. Stop his breath! -- as well try to stop a woman's tongue, as easy, indeed, for three Lilliputians to attempt to close the nostrils of the mighty Gulliver!

"Hurry up, boys!" sang out Cornell; "give it to him with the axe." And the steel sank deep in the blubber that was as soft and white as hog's lard. Like the shot, the stroke only seemed to give pleasure, and the broad tail gently fanned the water.

"Let's get on top of its back," said the Captain. "I'll follow," said Spady. "I'll risk it," put in Nathan, and "I guess I won't be backed out," said Warren Cobb, gave a hitch to his breeches and took a fresh bite at the plug of tobacco. Bill Johns "allowed that he would go," too, so preparations were made and all hands got ready to board the strange craft, though no boatswain's whistle was heard. But that whale's time hadn't come, and neither of the Cobb's or Spady was fated to play the role of Jonah, for the tide flooding in, had risen a couple feet, and the great fish floated off and started at a slow, leisurely gait up the channel; the boat getting on the outside, kept up with him, Nathan blazing away into the moving mass, trying to make him shear off and run into the breakers; but that whale wasn't born yesterday. Contemptuously ignoring the peppering from Nathan's No. 4 Greener, he pursues his tortuous way, always keeping in the channel as well as the most expert pilot could have done. He didn't seem to be in a hurry, and made his way like a propeller which has stopped its wheel going, and moves evenly and slowly to its wharf; so calmly, sedately, leisurely the immense monarch of the deep reached the kingdom just as the sun dipped below the ocean's rim, and giving a gentle flirt with his tail, he sank out of sight and was seen no more.

The third and final scene ends the history of this whale. It is five years hence. In the year 1887, the good ship, The Dancing Sally, from Nantucket, a staunch whaler of 500 tons, lies off on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. The misty spectral light shows that the night of the polar winter is not far off. It is a calm but intensely cold day, the rigging of the ship choked with ice, makes spars, masts and ropes look as if they were manufactured of pure silver. The ocean, of deep blue, gleams like steel and reflects with marvelous fidelity the color and outline of the Dancing Sally, that gracefully rises and falls in the smooth, undulating billows. Afar off, gleaming in the immaculate white profile against the cerulean sky are towering icebergs that take the form of moated castles with turreted towers and postern gate. The sun shining upon it all, makes it gleam with the iridescent hues of opal.

A whale has been captured after a long chase and the whole ship is in a state of bustling activity. A dozen men with their cutting spades as sharp as razors are severing the blubber in huge cakes; another dozen are securing the carcass to the ship by the means of chains. A third detachment are rigging a derrick from the mast to be used as a crane to hoist up the immense pieces of fat, some thirty or forty feet long, when suddenly all the work is suspended, the busy hands stop, and a half a hundred eyes glance inquiringly towards a sailor who, crushing a handful of blubber between his horny flippers, starts, and then with his eyes protruding from his head, gives a loud hello and looks at the contents of his hand.

It is a handful of Nathan Cobb's shot!

"Smash your toplights, what's the matter?" roars the skipper stepping on the platform.

"May I be blowed," said the whaleman holding out his paw with the lead in it, "if somebody hasn't been a hunting this ere fish with a shot gun."

"That's so," said the skipper, examining the buckshot. "Shiver my timbers if I can account for it. I have followed the sea man and boy for forty years and never seed the like before."

The cutter scratched his head, while the crew in sympathy scratched theirs also. All at once his weather-beaten bronze face lighted up and he called:

"Cap'en!"

"Avast there, what is it?"

"What was the craft that was lost somewheres near the North Pole when they were trying to get to the open sea?"

"The Jeannette you mean, commanded by De Long."

"The same," was the reply. "Now this here whale must have blowed his flukes close along that ship, and the crew not having her irons handy and being jammed up in the iceflows, just pulls at him with a gun, d'yer see?"

"That's it Jack, but look ahead; lively, men, and stop that palaver," shouted the skipper, "this carcass will yield ninety barrels of oil and is worth a thousand dollars if its worth a cent. So lively, my lads, pitch in, my hearties. Loft ahoy! keep a sharp lookout," and then the skipper hummed, as he looked in his pocket for a match, that ancient song of the whaler:

Jack Darling was a landsman bold,

Who would a whaling go,

CHASSEUR.

COBB'S ISLAND, Va.