05 Whale Adventure Read Free Page A

clouds, the twenty white sails that billowed beneath him.
    He was in the ‘rings’, a sort of basket or crow’s-nest at the top of the mainmast. A hundred feet down was the deck of the Killer, but he could not see it. He could see nothing below him but the white clouds of canvas. For a while he was alone, soaring through the sky like a bird or a plane, white clouds below him and more white clouds, real ones, above.
    Not quite alone. One man shared his heaven. In the rings at the head of the foremast stood Jiggs, one of the crew. He, too, could not see the ship beneath. But he was not there to look at the ship. Both he and Roger were posted as lookouts to watch for whales.
    There they stood, only thirty feet apart, but with an impassable canyon between them. It was as if they were each perched on a mountain-top separated by a deep valley filled with cloud. The cloud ended only a few feet below them and it was easy to imagine that you could walk across this white floor from the head of the mainmast to the head of the foremast. But when you remembered that the floor was not reliable and would treacherously let you plunge to your death on the deck a hundred feet below, it made your head swim and hands grip the rail of your dizzy basket.
    Of course, it was the basket that was dizzy - Roger wouldn’t admit that he was. The basket was going round in circles. The sea was fairly smooth, but there was enough of a swell to roll the ship slightly from side to side and make it lazily heave and pitch.
    Those on deck might not notice the motion, but a movement of a few inches there was exaggerated to many feet at the masthead. So it was that Roger was spun round and round until he began to have a distinctly uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach.
    This was his first day of whaling. The Killer had left Honolulu at dawn. After their interview with Captain Grindle the boys and Mr Scott had gone ashore for their gear. There Scott had said goodbye to his colleague, Sinclair, who had been unable to go with him on the Killer because the captain had insisted that one ‘science fellow’ was enough to bother with. Hal and Roger had said their own goodbyes to their friends on the schooner Lively Lady, on which they had sailed the far Pacific. The schooner was still under charter by the American Museum, and the skipper, Captain Ike, and the Polynesian boy, Ohio, would look after it until the return of the Killer in three weeks.
    The first night on board had not been too happy. The first surprise came at dinner-time.
    There was no dining-saloon for the crew, not even a table. The men formed in line and walked past a small window in the wall of the galley (kitchen). Through this window the cook thrust out to each man a pan of meat and beans and a chunk of hardtack (ship-biscuit).
    Then you could look for a place to sit down. Of course, there were no chairs. You might sit on the fo’c’sle head, or on a hatch cover, or on the deck itself.
    Or you could eat standing up. This was not too bad because the eating did not take long. It was not the sort of food you would linger over. You got it down as fast as possible. In five minutes it was stowed away.
    As for the hardtack, it was well named. It was so hard that the best teeth could scarcely make a dent in it, and most of the men threw their biscuits overside or tried to hit the gulls and terns that wheeled above the ship.
    Having emptied their pans the boys were about to take them back to the galley when a sailor prompted:
    ‘Clean ‘em first.’
    ‘Where’s the water?’ Hal asked.’
    ‘Water my hat!’ exclaimed the sailor. ‘What do you think this is, a bloomin’ yacht? You’ll be lucky if you get enough water to drink - there’s none to spare for washin’.’
    He pulled some rope-yarn from his pocket. It was a tangled mass almost as fluffy as absorbent cotton. He wiped his pan, then threw the sticky wad into the sea. He gave some of the yarn to the boys and they followed the