Barney and the Secret of the Whales Read Free Page A

down at the harbour. ‘The Britannia and four of the others are whiter, sir,’ I said at last. The Britannia looked almost like a skeleton of a ship it was so pale, but I didn’t want to say that to its captain.
    â€˜Aye. That’s from the scrubbing. Whale oil is slippery, so the ship must be scrubbed, and the ash from the whale hide itself is the best soapstone of all. A few years of that and the wood is bleached white as you see it here. So you can see well enough to read her name, eh? Do you see aught else about her?’
    I grinned at him. ‘Not unless I climb the tree to get a better view, sir.’ Most of the trees in the colony had been cut down for their timber, but Mrs Johnson had made sure one big beauty had been left near our back door, so she could teach her classes there in the shade in summer.
    Captain Melvill looked at the tree, and then at me. It had a trunk that went up thirty feet or more before it spread out its branches. ‘You’d need to grow a bit, lad, before you could reach those branches. Or fetch a ladder.’
    I’d been hoping he’d think that. I found the first foothold in the trunk, then gripped it with my knees and arms, the way Birrung had taught me, and inched my way up. There were handholds if you knew where to find them. Captain Melvill was sure to be impressed.
    I grabbed hold of the first branch and hoisted myself up onto it. ‘See, sir?’ I called down. ‘Easy.’
    He laughed. ‘I’ve seen monkeys that can’t climb that well. What can you see now you’re up there?’
    â€˜A platform thing on deck, sir.’ I squinted again. ‘It almost looks like bricks. And two things like big iron mouths.’
    â€˜Ah, you do have good eyesight. Bricks it is: five feet of brick and mortar supported by great timbers underneath. You have to boil a whale down to get its oil. What would happen if you lit a fire like that on an ordinary craft?’
    â€˜The ship would burn, sir,’ I said promptly, then thought about the Indian women’s fires in their canoes. But those were small fires, on green wet grass.
    â€˜So our ship has a platform that doesn’t burn. That’s the tryworks. And those openings that you called mouths are mouths indeed: mouths for the whale skin. Those mouths are our furnaces and whale skin is what we burn. No ship can carry enough wood to boil down a whale. We carry a little to get the blaze started, but after that the whale itself provides the fuel for the process.’
    He gazed out at his ship just like Mr Johnson looked at Mrs Johnson sometimes: a look of love that hurt your heart a bit. ‘I’ll tell you what you can’t see, lad. Timbers with whale teeth instead of wooden pins to hold them fast. A captain’s chair up on that quarterdeck carvedfrom one great whale’s jawbone — and its roof is made from whalebone too. Even the boat’s tillers are made from whalebone. And down in the cabins there’ll be harpoonists shaving before they come ashore. Do you know what they will be shaving with?’
    â€˜Razors, sir?’
    â€˜Harpoons and lances. Longer than a man and sharper than any knife in this colony. And each of them dearer to the man who wields it than his family. Those lances strike into the heart of a whale, but they hold the heart of the man who throws them too. There is no battle like that between man and the sea and the whale, lad. None.’ He beckoned. ‘Come on down now.’
    I shinned down the tree quicker than going up. Captain Melvill made room for me on the seat. He puffed on his pipe for a bit, then turned to me again. ‘You should see us boiling down a whale, boy. It’s something no landsman could even dream about. Two great fires like the flames of hell, the smoke a black mist about the ship. And with every puff of smoke you know there’s another barrel of oil being filled to make us rich.’
    â€˜Are