05 Whale Adventure (11 page)

The captain would not let himself be side-tracked from his purpose. ‘Bruiser, did you hear my order?’

The second mate tried again.

‘Sir, this man Hunt has given us a big whale. It’s well over a hundred barrels, sir. He brought it back single-handed.’

The captain flew into a rage. He fired twice and men dropped to the deck to get out of the way of the singing bullets.

‘What!’ he cried. ‘Am I to be questioned and corrected by my own officers? The next time I fire it won’t be for fun. And you,’ he pointed the gun at Bruiser, ‘will be my target if you don’t carry out my orders. Spread-eagle the Gent!’

Bruiser still hesitated, and the captain might have carried out his threat if Hal had not stepped forward.

‘Better do as he says,’ Hal said, and placed himself with his face against the mainmast and his arms stretched forward around the mast, his legs braced apart. Bruiser bound the two hands together, thus tightly securing the victim to the mast. From a utility chest the captain pulled out the cat-o’-nine-tails and put it in Bruiser’s hand.

‘Eighty lashes!’ he ordered.

Again an angry growl went through the crew. Then Scott, the scientist, pushed his way through the crowd and faced Captain Grindle.

‘Captain, may I have a word with you - in private?’

‘Can’t it wait till this is done?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Scott. Placing his hand on the captain’s arm he led him back out of earshot.

‘Captain, I am a passenger on this ship and not one of your crew, so you may allow me to speak to you frankly. I would earnestly advise you not to flog this man. Flogging belongs to the old days - it is forbidden by modern maritime law.’

‘Now let me tell you something,’ said the angry captain. ‘This ship belongs to the old days. So do I. I’ve always made my own law aboard ship and I intend to keep right on making it. If that’s all you have to say to me, you’re wasting your time.’

‘It’s not quite all,’ said Scott, trying to keep his voice polite and reasonable. ‘Hunt may have been impertinent - but I think you might excuse him since he has just done you a very great service.’

‘Done me a great service? How?’

‘By bringing in this whale. It was really a very remarkable feat. The whale, as you well know, is worth round about three thousand pounds, and a good proportion of the profit goes to you. The rest will be divided among the men. Naturally they are very happy about it and Hunt is very popular with them. If you have him flogged, I don’t think they’ll stand for it.’

The captain’s face behind the black bristles flushed an angry red. ‘You threaten me with mutiny? Do you know I could clap you in irons for that? You’re a passenger, but remember I’m master over passengers as well as crew. You’ll do well to keep a civil tongue in your head.’

‘I’m trying to keep a civil tongue,’ said Scott. What else could he say to influence this stubborn bully? He would try flattery. ‘I know you’re the master, and I know you’re a strong man and I know that even without a gun you’re the equal of any man on board.’

‘Equal?’ snapped the captain. I’m better. There’s not a man in the crew who could stand up to me in a fair fight.’

‘Not even Hunt?’

The captain fell into the trap.

‘Hunt? Why, I could take him apart with my bare hands.’

‘Now you’re talking!’ exclaimed Scott, pretending to be lost in admiration, That sounds like a real man. No gun. A man like you doesn’t need a gun. You could leave it in your cabin. You wouldn’t be afraid to do that. Not you.’

‘Afraid?’ scoffed Grindle, ‘I’ll show you how afraid I am of that young squirt.’

He took out the revolver and went down the companionway to his cabin. He came back without the gun. He strode up the deck to the mainmast.

‘Loose that man,’ he ordered.

Bruiser, wonderingly, unbound Hal’s hands. Hal turned about to face the captain.

Grindle’s pop eyes swept haughtily over his crew like a pair of searchlights.

‘Breach of discipline,’ he said, ‘don’t go on the Killer. It has to be punished. Yesterday this man made insulting remarks about my ability to run a ship. Today he has the impudence to come back from the dead and try to scare me with a pack o’ ghost tricks. He didn’t scare me a bit. I’m so little scared of him I’m going to give him a choice. A choice between the cat and these two hands!’

He stopped for a moment to let the idea soak in.

‘It ain’t fair,’ came a voice from the crowd. ‘You got a gun.’

‘No gun,’ said Grindle. ‘It’s below decks. A man like me don’t need a gun. The science fellow says so, and he’s right. Don’t heed a cat neither. Just my own bare hands, that’s enough. And when I get done with this varmint he won’t have one bone connected to another,’

He turned to Hal. ‘Or perhaps you’d rather have the eighty? Whichever you prefer. Our aim is to oblige.’ He bowed in mock courtesy.

It was not easy for Hal to decide. Eighty lashes would, he knew, leave him an unconscious bleeding heap on the deck. Men had died under the blows of the cat-o’-nine-tails. The alternative was a hand-to-hand fight with Grindle. That could be tough too. Hal was tall and powerful for his age, but Grindle was enough taller so that he could look straight over Hal’s head. He was heavier and more solidly set. Long years of sea life had put muscles that bulged like sausages under the skin of his arms and back of his shoulder-blades. His hands were as big as meat-hooks. ‘Come on, Gent!’ demanded Grindle. ‘Cat or hands?’ ‘Hands,’ said Hal and closed with his opponent. At once he felt the hands that he had invited locked round his own throat. Hal ducked and plunged his head into the big fellow’s stomach. Grindle let out a grunt of surprise and relaxed his grip just enough so that Hal could tear loose. Hal backed off a few feet.

‘Hah!’ exclaimed Grindle. ‘Running away already!’ He came fast, his big gorilla-like hands outstretched. Hal let him come. He even helped him to come. He seized one of the hands and pulled, twisting to the right at the same time. The captain went over Hal’s shoulder, turned a somersault, and came down on his back on the deck. The breath was knocked out of him, and some of the conceit too.

Hal had not visited Japan in vain. While there, his Japanese friends had taught him some of the moves of judo (ju-jitsu). The principle of judo is to let your opponent destroy himself. You conquer by yielding. If he plunges at you you let him come, but step out of the way at the last moment and let him plunge into the fill. If he comes running you may trip him and give him a bad fall. His own speed is his undoing. If he swings a fist at you you may seize him by the wrist and increase his swing so that he throws his shoulder out of joint. If he exerts a nerve or muscle you may increase the strain to the danger-point by striking that nerve or muscle. At such a moment of strain, a slight tap on a sensitive spot may have a crippling effect. The judo-fighter is taught the location of these sensitive spots; for example the elbow, or funny bone, where a nerve is partially exposed, the armpit, the ankle, the wrist-bones, the liver, a tendon below the ear, the nerves of the upper arm, and the Adam’s apple.

In judo the man with the big muscles may be beaten by the man with the quick brain. Hal was no expert in judo, but he knew more about it than his opponent. He might not be as strong as the captain, but he was wiry, swift, and intelligent. If Grindle was a lion, Hal was a panther.

The captain never knew where to find him. He lowered his head and charged like a bull, hoping to strike Hal in the solar plexus - he found himself butting the capstan instead. He shot his great fist towards Hal’s face, but Hal moved his head to one side and the fist caught Bruiser an ugly crack on the jaw.

‘Look out what you’re doing,’ growled Bruiser.

The men were laughing. The captain got the painful impression that he was making a fool of himself. Was he going to be beaten by this gent? Not if he knew it. He would bash the fellow’s head in. He seized a belaying-pin. ‘Not fair,’ yelled the crowd. ‘Hands only.’ Grindle swung the heavy club, but at the moment when it should have made contact with Hal’s head he felt a sharp rap on his wrist that spoiled his grip and the weapon went overboard.

With a savage curse he pulled a knife from his belt. His crew booed him but he paid them no heed. He rushed at Hal, who retreated swiftly until he backed up against one of the try-pots. Grindle came on at a dead run. At the last moment Hal ducked, seized one of the captain’s ankles and heaved. Grindle was lifted in the air and came down head-first into the pot.

Luckily for him the blubber was not boiling. The try-pots had been neglected when the big whale came in and the fire had burned low. The contents of the pot were like a rank-smelling jelly or paste, and when the captain’s head finally popped up out of the mess it was completely covered with half-solid blubber. The men rocked with laughter.

The captain rubbed blubber from his eyes and spat blubber from his mouth. ‘Get me out of here!’ he screamed.

Hal and Bruiser pulled him out and he collapsed on the deck in a puddle of grease. He still held his knife, but all the fight had gone out of him.

He stood up, dripping blobs of fat. He wobbled aft to his cabin and left a river of blubber behind him.

After he had stripped, cleaned himself as well as he could and put on fresh clothes, he sat down heavily to think things over. Before him on his desk was his open log-book. His eyes fell on the entry:

On this day, Seaman Hal Hunt, guilty of defying established authority, received eighty lashes.

He crossed it out.

Grindle took up his revolver.

He balanced it on the palm of his hand. This gun was his only friend. It felt good. Courage flowed from it up his arm and into his chest.

Much of the conceit had been cooked out of him by his plunge into the pot of whale grease. The gun made him feel better. He was still master, so long as he possessed the only firearm on the ship.

He could hear them still laughing on deck. His friend, the gun, would stop that. A gun has no sense of humour.

‘I’ll show them,’ he muttered.

His anger grew as he looked at the spoiled page of his log. What would the ship’s owners think when they read this page? A man was logged as dead, but wasn’t dead. The same man got eighty lashes, but didn’t. What kind of nonsense was this? The owners would think the captain a fool for writing such things and then crossing them out. Didn’t he know his own mind?

He knew what he was going to do now, but he wouldn’t write it down this time until it was done. As soon as he felt a little less wobbly he was going to go on deck with this gun and fill the Gent’s carcass with bullets. Then he would write in his log that he had been compelled to use the gun in self-defence against an unruly seaman who had tried to murder him.

He thought this over. He began to see that it would not work. The crew was against him. If he shot Hunt they would report it to the police as soon as the ship reached port.

A sly grin came over his bristly face.

I’ve got it, he thought. Ill fool ‘em. Make ‘em think it’s all right between me and the Gent. Pretend we let bygones be bygones. No hard feelings. We had a fight and it’s all over and now we’re as friendly as two kittens in a basket. And after I get them thinking that way they won’t blame me when the Gent has an accident.

He settled back happily into his chair. A real bad accident. I’ll fix it for him so he won’t come out of it alive. But nobody’ll be able to pin anything on me.

He got up and tried his legs. They still felt like two ribbons of spaghetti. His back was bruised where it had thumped the deck, his solar plexus ached where Hal had dived into it, and his head was battered where he had bashed it against the capstan.

He looked in the mirror. His skin had been blistered here and there by the hot blubber. He could be thankful it had not been hotter. But he was not thankful -only possessed by a terrible hate and passion for revenge.

To think that a nineteen-year-old boy had done all this to him! Wrathfully he blew his nose; blubber filled his handkerchief. He wiped the last traces of blubber from the corners of his eyes, and dug blubber out of his ears. Despite all his cleaning, he still smelled like a dead whale.

He went up on deck. The fires had been built up again and the blubber in the try-pots was boiling. The black smoke rising from the whale-scraps that were fed into the fire, and the white steam rising from the try-pots swirled and swooped through the rigging like great black and white birds. Men dumped chunks of blubber into the pots and other men drew off the oil into barrels. At the same time men out on the cutting-stage were beginning to peel off the hide of Hal’s great whale. Everyone was in great good humour, still laughing at what had happened to the captain.

‘There he is!’ someone warned, and they all quit work to see what would happen. ‘He’ll be hopping mad,’ said one. ‘He’ll probably shoot the place up,’ said another, and looked for something to hide behind.

‘He’ll kill Hunt,’ said someone else. ‘I’d hate to be in Hunt’s shoes now.’

Another said: ‘If he lays a hand on Hunt, we’ll finish him.’

But the captain did not pull his gun and he did not seem to be in a rage. In fact there was something almost like a smile behind the porcupine bristles. ‘Hunt,’ he called. ‘I have something to say to you.’ Hal stepped forward. He was as wary as a cat, and ready to move fast if the captain drew his gun. But Grindle only stretched out his hand.

‘Put it there,’ he said. ‘Let’s shake hands and forget it. Nobody can say I ain’t a good sport. It was a fair fight and you beat me and that’s that. Shake.’

Hal did not remind the captain that it was not a fair fight Instead of fighting hand to hand as agreed, Grindle had taken up a belaying-pin and then a knife. No good

sport would do that. But Hal was so grateful for Grindle’s change of heart that he impulsively shook the hand of the captain of the Killer.

‘It’s very handsome of you to feel that way about it,’ Hal said. ‘I was afraid you might be sore.’