Barney and the Secret of the Whales Read Free Page B

you rich, sir?’
    I thought I might get a cuff on the ear for that. But he just laughed. ‘I will be when this voyage is through.There are more whales in the Southern Ocean than we’ve ever seen up north. And no one knows they are even there, except a few of us who’ve made the voyage here or talked to someone who has. Those are the world’s greatest whaling grounds, just there for the harvest. Every man who sails on the Britannia is going to go home rich.’
    â€˜Every single one, sir?’
    He nodded. ‘The ship owner takes his third, and I get a goodly portion too, and the harpooners. But there’s wealth enough for us all, once we sail back to England with our hold full of barrels of oil. Whale oil, the best and cleanest fuel there is; rich man’s oil, so his lamps don’t smoke. And of course the whalebone — there’s money in that too, though not near as much as in the oil.’
    He looked out at the harbour again. ‘But it’s not just the money, boy,’ he said softly. ‘There’s no life like it. You know who gets to breathe the winds first? Not the King of England. Us, out at sea. Men pitting themselves against the great beasts of the ocean and the great waves too.’
    I could almost see it. The great whale rearing up, about to chew up the ship, men with swords and spears pursuing it, till the monster lay still, defeated.
    â€˜Well, boy? Are you coming with us?’
    â€˜Me, sir?’
    He laughed again. ‘Why not? I’m offering you the best chance of your life to get rich. Probably your only chance. You sail for three years with us and you can stock that farm of yours. Build a big house.’
    Be a gentleman, I thought. Me, Barney Bean, a gentleman. Mr and Mrs Johnson had taught me my manners and to speak properly and to read. All I needed now was money and I could be a gentleman.
    â€˜I’m thinking that Governor Phillip will give grand land grants to those who’ve been whaling,’ he said softly. ‘My business is going to make this colony wealthy.’
    â€˜Wealthy? Sydney Town?’ I looked at the huddled huts below us. Most were collapsing already, the cabbage-tree roofs rotting and the bark walls too. The colony wasn’t starving, but we hadn’t been far off it for a while. Most convicts still lived on gruel made from their rations. A colony of rags and pannikins the bloke next to you would steal soon as look at you.
    â€˜Aye, rich. Whaling ships need food.’ He waved at the vegetable garden behind me, the goats on their tethers beyond the orchard. ‘In a few years your sheep and cows and goats will multiply. And our whaling ships will buy your meat, and at good prices too. And your corn, andtimber. Down there?’ He gestured at the straggle of huts along the harbour. ‘Within ten years there’ll be quays and piers and merchants and ship chandlers supplying everything a whaling ship needs. But just for now,’ he grinned, ‘the southern whaling grounds are secret. It will just be the Britannia and the four other ships that’ll be harvesting their whales this year and the next. What do you say, boy? Are you sailing with us? Going to feel the green waves galloping like horses? Challenge the winds and the sea and creatures that make every building in this colony look puny? Will you make your fortune too?’

CHAPTER 3
    Rich?
    I tossed in bed that night, for all it was the best bed I’d ever slept in. Me, Barney Bean, sleeping in a clean bed with sheets and a patchwork quilt!
    Except I couldn’t sleep. At last I lit the wick of the slush lamp. It stank of mutton fat, not like the expensive oil Captain Melvill and his sailors would bring back from whaling, that people said had no smell or smoke at all. I tiptoed down the stairs and out onto the hill above the house. I sat on the big wooden bench Mr Johnsonhad made, with his own hands, just like he wasn’t a