by Scott O'Dell
I did not know what happened to Mando until noon when the men came in to eat. He was as oily and black as the rest and when he spoke his teeth glistened white against his skin.
"What do you do?" I whispered to him.
"I toss hunks of blubber into the pots," he whispered back. "The heat and the smoke are bad. And the smell, it does something to the stomach. Tomorrow I will go crazy and jump overboard. Maybe I will go crazy before tomorrow."
8
THE COOK was fat and enjoyed eating. He enjoyed chewing tobacco, too, which he carried in a leather pouch. He enjoyed both so much that he chewed and ate at the same time, holding the tobacco under his lower lip while he munched away. He spat a lot, sometimes in the fire. But the next morning when I helped him slice up the beef the mate had bought on shore he told me to take my time and not get in a hurry.
"This is no boarding house where they have to eat on the stroke of the hour," he said. "Here we serve mess when it's ready. Not a minute before."
In the afternoon he gave me some time and urged me to look around the ship.
"The Boston Boy is not a very pretty sight right now," he said. "But you can hold your nose and look where you want. If the men give you any lip, give it back to them. But mostly they're gentlemen—the rough sort, mind you. Besides, they've got no time for chatter."
He walked to the door of the galley, which ran from one side of the ship to the other, spat to windward, and came back.
"We ran into some sperm whales," he said. "What they're doing around here—usually it's the grays—nobody knows. But we caught us two and since we're on shares everybody is killing himself to fill every barrel on shipboard."
I was not interested in watching the men slice off the blubber in great long strips with their sharp flensing knives and haul the whales aboard with big hooks and fling them into the trying pots. I wanted to talk to my brother Mando and see if together we could think of some way to get away from the ship.
Most of the ship—all of the middle part—was given up to boiling the blubber. In front of one of the brick furnaces I found Mando. He was stripped to the waist and was feeding the fire under the pots. He had a pair of tongs and would reach in the pot and pull out pieces that no longer had oil in them and then fling them into the fire, where they blazed up and added mightily to the heat.
He glanced at me but there was no chance to talk. I tried to meet him that night after supper but I could not find him. It was not until the third day, in the afternoon, that an accident happened to the mate, the young man with the wrinkles and the gold earring, that gave us a chance to talk.
The mate had talked a lot at noon when he was eating, bragging about how rich everyone was going to be, now that a girl was aboard.
"Nothing but luck," he had said, "from now until the time we sight Boston port. Fair seas at the Cape, following winds, good weather."
He was talking to all the sailors who thought that it was bad luck to have a woman on the ship. There were many of them and I hoped they would cause a mutiny and put me ashore, but the very next day, the ship killed four more sperm whales, who the young mate said were a thousand miles from their usual haunts.
"Proves I was right," he bragged, and furthermore we'll take an Indian to Boston and show the citizens of that proper town what real Indians look like. No feathered savages, these ones."
He gave me an admiring smile. The smile and what he had said about taking us away and showing us off to strange people made me more determined than I ever was to flee from the ship.
He drank down the last of a flagon of wine he had bought nearby at Mission Ventura and went reeling on deck. I had cleaned up the table and was getting ready to wash the dishes with the help of a dwarf South Sea Islander they had picked up somewhere—and were also going to take to Boston—when I heard a scream, then the running of feet and the shouts of many men.
The commotion was caused by a strange accident that had befallen the earringed mate, whether from the wine he had drunk at the noon meal or from an odd misfortune, I do not know.
I had never seen a sperm whale before. The whales that live on our coast are different. They have a more fishlike look about them for one thing. But the sperm whale has a prow for a nose, like a great rock that rises straight from the sea. It forms a fourth part of the animal. The cook had told me this the first day when he had set me to peeling the basket of potatoes.
When Mando and I had first set foot on the ship, I had noticed an enormous head hanging at the bulwarks, held there by iron hooks fastened to ropes strung from above.
While I was peeling the basket of potatoes the cook had set before me, I asked him about this enormous head, which had loomed beside me when I had climbed on deck. I remembered the fright I had felt at this great dangling maw with its ivory teeth that looked as long as my arm. Beyond it hung still another of these giant heads, its mouth gaping open.
"Pure ivory," said the cook. "Valuable, but it's the head that's the treasure. Full of spermaceti, it is. Enough to fill five casks. It makes the finest perfume, young lady, this sweet-smelling whale oil."
"I have none," I said.
"If you did, here's where it would come from."
I ran out of the galley at the sound of screams and running feet. The cook followed me. Men were clustered around one of these hanging whale heads, some with knives, others with spades. They were all talking at once.
Mando grabbed my arm. "It's the mate. The one with the gold earring," he said. "He has fallen and will drown."
The mate, it seemed, had insisted upon cutting into the heads. This was his task, one that no one else could do so well. Not only to cut into the animal at the proper place but to manage the bailing out of the precious liquid it held in its enormous head.
After the iron bucket had gone down more than a dozen times, like a bucket into a well, and come back filled, the mate somehow had slipped and fallen deep down into the whale's skull, which was like a deep cavern.
His screams came up from the cavern, growing louder and louder while the men stood by, planning how best to reach him. First the iron bucket was taken from the pole and the pole lowered into the well. But, for some reason, the mate did not grasp it.
His screams grew fainter. Then someone with a flensing knife hacked at the underside of the whale's skull. The precious liquid poured out and with it the mate. He fell into the sea, drifted face downward, and before anyone could reach him sank from view. A few oily bubbles marked the place where he had gone down. Then the hat he had worn bobbed up and the sea was quiet.
All the ship's longboats, including ours, were manned. They went around in circles over the place where the mate had disappeared, but all they found was the hat he had worn, glistening with the precious oil that covered the sea.
9
IT WAS the drowning of the mate that gave us a chance to escape from the Boston Boy.
The crew spent the rest of the afternoon searching for his body. They rowed in ever widening circles around the ship, using all of the longboats, of which they had five, including ours.
They searched until dusk when hunger drove them back to the ship. I was in the galley with the cook, the only sailor aboard who did not man an oar, except my brother and the captain, who kept mostly to his cabin, which was astern of us. From time to time during the afternoon he would appear on deck, hoist a spyglass to his eye, search the movement of each boat and then disappear.
Between peeling potatoes and cutting up strips of salt pork I had an opportunity to speak to Mando. After the third day the captain had decided to make him a cabin boy. I guess he had seen him tending fire under the trying pots and was taken by the way he did his work.
In any event the captain had him dressed up in a white sweater and white pants—the only pants that Mando had ever owned—and kept him busy running errands. One of the errands that afternoon brought Mando to the galley for a cup and a crock of tea.
After the cook had made the tea and given it to my brother I follo
wed him to the deck. He hurried along, me at his side, but we had a brief chance to speak.
"I heard the captain talking," said Mando. "He was talking to the second mate who is the first mate now. He said that the casks were full of oil and that they would sail for home tomorrow and for him to get everything ready."
"Then this is the last night we will have a chance to flee," I said.
"The captain also told the new mate that he was taking us with him to Boston. Wherever that is."
"I think it is far away," I said. "But wherever it is I am not going. I will jump overboard first and swim to the island."
"It is a long swim," Mando said. "And what would we do on the island?"
"We could find enough food to eat. We would wait until someone at the Mission found us. We could make fires and signal them," I said.
"There are many sharks out there, Zia. They were gnawing hunks out of dead whales all day. One of the men shot three, but more, many more, came back to eat."
There was a look in his eye and a tone to his words that surprised me and suddenly made me suspicious. "You are not thinking of going with the ship?"
"I have thought of it," Mando said.
"But you are not going?"
"I have no choice in these matters. Nor do you. We are the captives of the white men."
The idea of being a captive was something new for him. He seemed to like it.
"No," I said, "I am not a captive. Nor are you."
He began to move away. "I have to take the tea to the captain," he said.
"The captain can wait for his tea. Do you think we can find our boat in the dark?"
Mando stopped. "We can find it, but it will have no oars. They take all the oars on the ship at night."
"Because there are others who would like to escape also," I said. "That is why they hide the oars?"
Mando shrugged and started on his way. I followed him along the deck, within a few feet of the captain's door.
"Where do you sleep at night?" I said.
"In a locker over there." He pointed to a shelter nearby, without a door.
"Do you hear the ship's bell when it strikes?" I said.
"Sometimes I hear it. Sometimes not when I am sleeping."
"Tonight stay awake and hear it," I said, "when it strikes six times." I held my hands out and counted six on my fingers. "Six times means it is eleven o'clock."
"At the Mission six bells means six o'clock," said Mando. "Time to go and eat."
"Here they mean eleven o'clock. By then everyone will be asleep, except the man who watches the deck. Meet me here at the rail when you hear the six bells. And bring your knife."
"What if I do not choose to hear the bells," Mando said.
"You are eleven years old but you have not reached manhood," I said.
"I will be twelve in a moon or so," Mando said defiantly. "So I am twelve."
He lingered. "How can we run the boat without oars?" he asked. "We have no sail, either. How do we move?"
"We both can hold on to the rudder and kick our legs, as if we were swimming."
"What of the sharks?"
"There are more of them here on the ship than in the sea," I said. "Many more. And the captain is one of them."
"In the morning the captain will find that we are gone," Mando said. "He will send the boats out to search for us."
"We will be near Mission Ventura by morning. The current runs strong here in the channel and it runs toward the shore."
"I do not like what you say," Mando replied. "I do not like being without oars or a sail. What if the men who watch through the night see us? What of the sharks? What if the men search for us in the morning? What if they find us and put us in chains? There are two in chains now. They live in a dark hole down where the oil is stored." Mando walked toward the captain's door. "I do not like it," he said.
"We will find a way to reach Karana and bring her home to the Mission," I said. "She belongs to our tribe. She belongs to us especially. I left my home to find her."
Night was falling. The boats were coming back from their search. The men were tying them up and climbing the rope ladder.
"Do not forget," I said. "We are slaves to no one. Nor are we something for people to stare at. Remain awake. Listen for the six bells. And come promptly with your knife."
I went back to the galley, to the storeroom where I slept. I put some of the beef left from supper in a bag with a handful of big round crackers, hard as stones. From the rack beside the stove I took the sharpest knife the cook owned and put it into the bag. Then I sat down to wait for the six bells to strike.
Whether Mando would defy me and decide to remain with the ship and the white men, I did not know. But I knew that somehow I would find my way to shore.
10
AT THE sixth stroke of the ship's bell I took my bag, which held food, a knife, and a flask of water, and went to the galley door.
I had noticed as I sat waiting in the galley that the man on watch had walked the deck on the opposite side of the ship. He had walked to the bow and then to the stern. Then he stayed at each place for several minutes, then walked slowly back. He never walked on the left side of the ship because casks of whale oil were piled there.
One of his boots squeaked and I could hear each step that he took. He was now at the stern. I looked around the corner of the galley door and saw him standing there by the wheel gazing out at the sea. The ship's ladder hung from the bulwarks, not far from where he stood.
I waited in the shadows until I heard the squeak of his boot pass the galley door. Quietly in my bare feet I slipped out and ran along the deck to the place near the captain's door where I was to meet Mando. He was not there. I could hear the squeak of the watchman's boot. He had reached the bow of the ship. He would stand there for a short time and then come back.
I decided that if Mando did not come at once I would go myself. There was a small moon and I could see the top of the ladder, the two iron hooks that held it to the bulwarks. I ran toward it, climbed over, and found the first step.
The sea was dark. The boats were tethered to a long boom at the bottom of the ladder. I heard a sound beneath me as I went down and as I came to the last rung I saw a figure crouching in one of the boats. It was Mando. I saw the dull flash of his knife. He was cutting the rope that held the first of the longboats. It was a boat that the captain used.
"Take ours," I whispered to him.
"It is the last one out," he answered.
Above me I heard the tread of the watchman moving back from the bow. I jumped into the boat where Mando was hacking at the rope. "Crouch and make no noise," I said.
The watchman passed us and went to the stern. He came back slowly and stopped at the head of the ladder. I held on to Mando and both of us did not move until the watchman went on. Then Mando began to hack at the rope again.
"There is a knot in the rope. Have you tried to untie it?" I asked.
"I have tried. It is a special knot and I can do nothing with it."
"Let us take our boat," I whispered.
"What does it matter?" Mando said.
"It is ours," I said and climbed out of the captain's boat and into the one alongside.
Mando followed me. "A boat is a boat," he said.
"Island Girl is smaller and easier to handle," I said to end the argument.
We had reached her when I heard the squeak as the watchman moved above us. We crouched until he passed and came back. Then we both hacked hard at the rope that held us to the boom and freed ourselves.
I let myself over the side and, kicking my feet, slowly moved the boat to the side of the ship where the watchman did not pass.
Above us hung the monstrous heads. We passed a carcass and a second carcass, which had been stripped of all its fat. Mando took hold of the bones and helped me move the boat. Halfway along I told him to shove us away.
We left the carcass, moving with the tide and the waves in the direction of the island. Mando was in the wat
er beside me. If the watchman had passed along our side of the ship he could have seen us. Still, if he had looked toward the island when he stood at the bow or the stern, he could have seen us, too, even though we were moving slowly and quietly, grasping the rudder.
When the first light showed in the east, we reached the kelp bed that surrounds the island. The kelp was heavy and we could not push through it. We climbed in the boat and lay there, resting and trying to get warm. I looked off toward the coast. It was dim and far away.
"The tide is against us," I said. "We will rest and wait for a while. But we should go on. They will be out looking for us, and the first place they look will be here."
"It is another hour before breakfast," Mando said. "They will eat and go on deck. It will be two hours before anyone will notice that a boat is missing. Maybe it will be longer."
I wondered if, after all, he wanted to be caught and taken back to the ship.
"The cook will miss me in the galley," I said. "And the captain will miss you when his morning tea is not brought on the silver tray. They will know we are gone before the hour is out."
I looked again at the distant shore. It was too far away to see the sand dunes or the waves breaking. The island was between us and the ship and I could not see her either.
It was then that I noticed the rudder. It was made of three oar-shaped slats, each one longer than my arm, and fastened to the boat with light iron straps. I dug my knife into the wood and saw that we could free the bolts that held it.
By the time the sun was rising we had the rudder off. The three slats were held together by wooden pegs. We broke them loose and had two pieces that we could use as paddles.
"Vámanos!" I said. "The wind is with us and the tide soon will be."
Mando looked over his shoulder, in the direction of the ship. Slowly he put his paddle in the water and we set out for the distant shore.
When the sun was well up we had cleared the island and could see the three masts of the ship on the horizon. The makeshift paddles were not as good as oars, but we were gaining headway nonetheless. The tide and wind were with us and the mainland now was clear. I could see the tower of Mission Ventura.