By-Line Ernest Hemingway

by Ernest Hemingway

  And after a while the danger of others is the only danger and there is no end to it nor any pleasure in it nor does it help to think about it.

  But there is great pleasure in being on the sea, in the unknown wild suddenness of a great fish; in his life and death which he lives for you in an hour while your strength is harnessed to his; and there is satisfaction in conquering this thing which rules the sea it lives in.

  Then in the morning of the day after you have caught a good fish, when the man who carried him to the market in a handcart brings the long roll of heavy silver dollars wrapped in a newspaper on board it is very satisfactory money. It really feels like money.

  “There’s the bread of your children,” you say to Carlos.

  “In the time of the dance of the millions,” he says, “a fish like that was worth two hundred dollars. Now it is thirty. On the other hand a fisherman never starves. The sea is very rich.”

  “And the fisherman always poor.”

  “No. Look at you. You are rich.”

  “Like hell,” you say. “And the longer I fish the poorer I’ll be. I’ll end up fishing with you for the market in a dinghy.”

  “That I never believe,” says Carlos devoutly. “But look. That fishing in a dinghy is very interesting. You would like it.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” you say.

  “What we need for prosperity is a war,” Carlos says. “In the time of the war with Spain and in the last war the fishermen were actually rich.”

  “All right,” you say. “If we have a war you get the dinghy ready.”

  There She Breaches!

  OR Moby Dick off the Morro

  Esquire • MAY, 1936

  IT was a clear, cool day in October and we were drifting about three miles off Cabañas Fortress to the eastward of Havana. Inside of us were two or three skiffs also drifting for marlin, and further in toward shore we could see the calm surface of the Gulf Stream leap in sharp, minute splashes and hear the ta-ta-ta-tat of the machine guns firing on the rifle range, the limits of which were marked with red flags that showed on the white-walled green headland with the brown barracks behind it.

  “Once,” said Carlos, who was sitting in the stern holding a line wrapped around each of his big toes, “we had a very big fish on close in to the Morro and those things began to splash all around us.”

  “What did you do?” asked Lopez Mendez.

  “Made the fish fast and dove overboard and only put our noses out until we drifted clear.”

  “You’ve got a small nose,” said Lopez Mendez. “There’s no danger of being shot in a nose that size. But what if a fish strikes now and takes both your toes off? What do you do if a fish strikes now?”

  “Watch,” said Carlos and pulling on the end of the line that ran to the rod tip he tripped the bight that ran around his toe so it was free. “You can release it from the toe instantly, no matter how hard it is pulling below. It’s a trick. We go to sleep with a line on our toe that way drifting in a skiff and turn it loose the instant the pull wakes us.”

  “Everything’s a trick,” Lopez Mendez said. “Life is a very difficult trick to learn.”

  “No,” said Carlos. “No Señor. Life is a combat. But you have to know lots of tricks to make a living. You have a good trick in painting.”

  “Give me the trick of Enrique,” I said, in Spanish. “How do you feel this morning, Enrique?”

  “Marvelous,” said Enrique who was dark, good looking, an aviator, a captain of artillery, and a good amateur matador and was living in Havana with his cousin, Lopez Mendez, the painter, between revolutions in Venezuela where they both came from. “I always feel good.” He grinned, furrowing the stubble of his beard that showed an hour after shaving.

  “Last night,” said Lopez Mendez, who is very thin and distinguished looking, “Enrique ate only a straw hat and three candles.”

  “I don’t care for eating straw hats,” said Enrique. “But if some one proposes it, naturally I will eat them.”

  “He eats them very well,” said Lopez Mendez.

  “I don’t like them though,” said Enrique. “I can never raise any enthusiasm for a straw hat.”

  “What is he saying?” said the Maestro Arnold, from Minnesota, so called because he played the violin and who was on the boat as a photographer; as a very bad photographer.

  “He is telling about eating a straw hat,” I said.

  “Why in God’s name does he eat a straw hat?” asked the Maestro.

  “Listen Maestro,” said Lopez Mendez. “In Venezuela we have many great eaters. Late in the evening when a man wishes to perform an unusual feat of courage and show his disdain for consequences he will eat unusual and inedible objects.”

  “You’re kidding me,” said the Maestro.

  “No. I swear to God Enrique ate a straw hat last night.”

  “Yes,” said Enrique modestly.

  “The night before that he ate all the flowers off the table and several candles at the house of the secretary to the embassy.”

  “It was nothing,” said Enrique. “A candle is nothing. Only the wicks are difficult. Now I go to prepare the spaghetti. Where is Bolo?”

  “He’s up in the bow,” I said, “watching a line. Mice, go up in the bow and watch that line so Bolo can help Enrique get the spaghetti started.”

  “Let me get a big straw hat for the sun,” said the Maestro.

  “Don’t let Enrique eat it,” said Lopez Mendez.

  “No,” said Enrique. “There is no danger. No one has ever eaten a straw hat in the daytime.”

  So we drifted like that all morning, and, in the fall, the small birds that are going south are deadly tired sometimes as they near the coast of Cuba where the hawks come out to meet them, and the birds light on the boat to rest and sometimes we would have as many as twenty on board at a time in the cabin, on the deck, perched on the fishing chairs or resting on the floor of the cockpit. Their great fatigue makes them so tame that you can pick them up and they show no fear at all. There were three warblers and a thrush in the cockpit when Enrique poked his head out to get some air from working in the galley and Lopez Mendez said, “Don’t let him see the birds. He would eat them.”

  “No,” said Enrique. “I am a great lover of birds. In about half an hour the spaghetti will be ready.”

  “Let’s have vermouth then,” I said. “Tell Bolo to bring out the bottles.”

  We had the tall glasses with mixed French and Italian vermouth (two parts of French to one of Italian, with a dash of bitters and a lemon peel, fill glass with ice, stir and serve) in our hands and I was just raising mine when Carlos shouted “Que canonazo! Oh, what a cannon shot!”

  “Where?”

  “Way out there. To the eastward. Like the spout from a twelve inch shell.”

  We were at least four miles off shore by now and where Carlos pointed was another three miles to the eastward.

  “They’ve got no guns that will shoot out there, man,” I said.

  “I know it. I know it. God save us it must have been a fish. But what a fish to throw a spray as high as that!”

  “Watch and see if it jumps again,” I said. “We can get up the lines and run out there. What do you think it could be?”

  “Only a broadbill would jump like that and crash to make a spout of water like that in the middle of the day. It must be a huge broadbill.”

  “We better start to get the lines in and get out there,” I said. “Give me that one.”

  I started reeling in the hundred and twenty fathom deep line and was grinding and pumping away when Carlos shouted again. “There it is! There is is! My God but close! Hey! No! It’s a whale blowing!”

  I could see the spout, high, pluming out from a narrow stem like a geyser, about a mile off our starboard bow.

  “Get the lines in,” I yelled. “Bolo! Get the other line in. Enrique! Come on, kid. It’s a whale!”

  “Is it true?” asked Enrique. “An actual whale?”

&nbs
p; “Yes! Yes! Yes!” said Lopez Mendez. “Look there! Look.”

  “We’ll eat him,” said Enrique. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Reel in the rest of that line.”

  I started both engines and they were still reeling in on the lines with the whole tuna baits dragging in the wake as I headed the Pilar out to the north to intercept the whale on the course he was making to the westward. Carlos had the box with the harpoon gun in it out in the cockpit and was going over its contents. We had about twenty feet of wire cable and plenty of good light harpoon line but we knew that sort of line would never hold and Carlos said he was going to make the wire fast directly to our three-inch hurricane hawser. We sent Bolo to clear everything out of the forward cockpit and make one end of the hundred fathom hawser fast to our six new, clean, white, cloth-covered cork, regulation life jackets and then coil the hawser on top of them. On the end of the hawser he made the wire cable fast and I turned the wheel over to him and went into the forward cockpit with Bolo, putting a blank cartridge in the harpoon gun, fitting a dowling into the shank of the harpoon that was fastened onto the wire cable that led to the hawser and shoving the dowling down into the barrel of the sawed off old Springfield musket that served as harpoon gun and pressing it tight against the cartridge.

  I knew the harpoon gun would never carry out the weight of the hawser and that the effective range could only be the length of the wire cable, but I knew no reason why we could not get close enough to get the harpoon in solidly. The trouble was that neither did I know anything about whales.

  We planned, shouting back to the wheel and to the top of the house where Lopez Mendez sat with the 6.5 mannlicher, Enrique with a handful of extra sticks, the ramrod and a Mauser pistol and the Maestro with the big Graflex, when the whale was harpooned to let the hawser all go out, toss over the packet of life belts as he sounded, and whenever he came up to blow we would locate him by the life belts, pick them up, and stay with him, letting the life belts go over whenever we could not hold the hawser, and whenever the whale showed putting solids from the mannlicher into him and eventually being able to finish him with the killing lance. Then we were going to get a rope around his flukes, make a hole in him and pump him full of air with the air mattress pump. Every time I would get a new bright idea like that about the mattress pump I would shout it back and Enrique would cheer and wave the pistol. Carlos kept shouting, “A whale is worth a fortune in La Habana! a whale is worth a capital for life.”

  “God bless the whale!” Enrique would shout.

  “Death to the whale!” yelled Lopez Mendez.

  The Maestro was shaking with excitement.

  There, a little way ahead, was the whale. He was very impressive. He would swim a little way under water then his broad head would come out and he would go along with the slanted top of his back out, seemingly unconcerned, but when we speeded up the engine to come up on him close enough to fire the harpoon into him he would submerge. We tried coming up on him from the back, but he would go down each time before we were in range. Then we tried coming up on him from an angle, but down he would go again to be out of sight, only to reappear ahead of us, varying his course very little. Time after time we came within thirty feet of him only to have him go down. The speeding up of the motors seemed to frighten him and put him down and only by speeding up the motors could we come up on him. He was about forty feet long and as we came up close to him we could see the indentations along the side of his blunt head running back toward the body, as though someone had made them by rubbing a finger in warm wax. Again and again we were so close to him you could have hit him with a beer bottle, but I knew for the harpoon to hold we must be almost touching him with the boat when we fired.

  “Shoot! For God’s sake shoot!” Bolo screamed, pulling on his hair with one hand and holding the hawser high in the air with the other.

  “Shoot!” yelled Carlos.

  When I would pass up the shot they both held their heads in their hands.

  “It’s no use to shoot unless it’s close enough,” I yelled back. “The gun can’t carry the weight of that hawser.”

  Carlos shook his head. “In my life I have only seen three whales off Habana. A whale is worth a fortune. For God’s sake shoot!”

  The next time we came close and they began yelling to shoot, I said “All right. I’ll show you what I mean,” and fired when we were not quite thirty feet from the whale and he had lowered his head to sound. The blackpowder roared, the wire shot out, came taut with the weight of the hawser, and the dart was short. The whale went down and this time he came up a long way ahead and it was hard to see him in the sun.

  “You see now?” I yelled back. Carlos nodded, now understanding. Then there came a shout from the top of the house.

  “Look there! Look there!” Lopez Mendez was pointing and, as we looked astern to the eastward, there were spouts rising almost as far as you could see. It looked like a small geyser basin in Yellowstone Park. There were at least ten whales blowing at once and while we watched more than twenty showed; some close, some far out, some far to the east. Some spouts were high, thin plumes spreading on top. Others were low, squat, wide.

  While we had been chasing the single whale the whole school had been moving up behind us.

  “This can’t be,” said Bolo. “This can’t be.”

  “Come on,” I said. “We’ll try one from the side.”

  I yelled to Carlos and we headed out toward where two very big ones showed. We came close and put them both down without getting into range. This time I noticed a dark cloud like cuttlefish ink in the water as the two whales sounded.

  “Did you see that?” I yelled.

  They had all seen it.

  “Maybe they’ve been eating squid,” Carlos said. “Look! There’s another close.”

  We were within two feet of effective range when this whale went down, his great flukes rising out of the water and then sinking in that slow slant.

  Standing up on the deck I looked behind us. We were in the middle of the school now and the school was moving steadily to the westward against the current. Straight astern, less than a half a mile away, there were three whales, one of them, the center one, the biggest we had seen, coming directly toward us, and three of them moving steadily to the west into the sun.

  “Listen,” I said to Carlos, “turn her around and head for that center whale. Steer directly for him head to head. Keep the motors exactly as they are now until I raise my hand. When I raise my hand open them both wide. When I shoot cut your motors and throw out the clutch. Understand.”

  “Si señor,” said Carlos. “Now we’ll get one.”

  As we came up on them they were down once, a little under water, then coming as straight as submarines, the squared off rather tubular looking heads and the rising hump of the back awash like submarines running partly submerged. They held their course and I could feel Bolo trembling with excitement as he held the hawser above his head.

  “For God’s sake don’t get tangled in that,” I said. “Throw it when I shoot and step back clear.”

  “It’s all clear,” he said.

  Then not forty feet ahead was the great, dark, side-furrowed, dully shiny head and the huge bulk much longer than our boat and, fixing on it, not seeing where the other two had gone, I raised my hand and as the boat lurched forward with the two motors wide open, leaned down over the bow and almost touched that head as I fired the gun into it as it slanted down. There was the noise, the white cloud of blackpowder smoke, a drenching spout of evil-smelling something that went all over us, over the deck, the windshield and the top of the house, and the hurricane hawser was going over the bow so fast it seemed almost to smoke. Then it was slack. We pulled it in and the harpoon was all right. But it had pulled out. I found out later that you do not harpoon sperm whales in the head. Not even with a cannon. There is too much bone.

  Anyway we followed the school into the sun as they worked to westward until they were almost at Mariel
and we could never get another shot. They would never let us come as close as we had before we struck the big whale. The speeding up of the rhythm of the propeller beating seemed to put them down.

  We headed back toward Havana finally and we saw one old lone whale dark grey and huge and travelling by himself, but he would not let us get near him. At about four-thirty we ate the spaghetti Enrique had cooked and discussed whether we had good pictures of them. The Maestro was certain he had marvelous pictures. But the next day when we got the prints they were uniformly lousy. Most of them were taken into the sun; in some he had moved the camera in excitement; in others he shot when the whales were too far away, and he had a series of masterly shots of the holes they would leave in the water when they went down. Later he had whale spout on his lens and produced some shots that looked like waterfall pictures from the inside. The only good picture was one Lopez Mendez had snapped with his little camera before the Mice took it away from him when his Graflex film ran out, and this the Havana paper, to whom Lopez Mendez gave it to prove he was not a liar, never returned. The Maestro was depressed by the pictures but not as much as we were. We all knew his failure with the camera would make liars out of us for the rest of our lives.

  When something like that happens nobody believes you. They certainly don’t believe you when they see the vague pictures which were published in the rotogravure section of the Diario de la Marina in Havana. I had no reason to believe there were sperm whales off Havana and it was hard for me to believe it myself. If you choose not to believe it, that is perfectly all right with me. But this fall in New York I went around to the Museum of Natural History and on the charts of the old whaling voyages there found that sperm whales had been regularly taken off Havana in the old days. Where these were headed for I don’t know but it seems logical that they were heading for the Caribbean and then south. The day we saw them was October tenth, 1934 and the big one we struck was close to fifty feet long.

  That night in the restaurant there were some people who did not believe Enrique either. This distressed him so that he was forced to eat the labels off several beer bottles. This feat being received with some incredulity, he ate a calendar off the wall and devoured a small croton plant that stood by the table. Having his public now well in hand, he ate the complete rotogravure section of the Diario de la Marina and offered to eat the table. Nobody believed he would not try.