Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal Read Free

convert my cabin
into the ship’s magazine.

Saturday, 19 June 2004 10:32 AM
The Pirate Gets His
    We found the pod right where it’d been sighted the day before
yesterday. The whale bringing up the rear was very fat. But not
fat enough. Major let-down. Not just for me, but the whole crew,
particularly the harpooners, Flarq and the silo-sized Thesaurus
(that’s the name the poor sod’s folks stuck him with, but no
one’s fool enough to mock him), who were drooling for “a whirl”
as they put it. My feelings about sport-harpooning a slow and
innocent sperm whale aside, the special religious dispensation
whaling license, which cost me all I had in the world save pocket
change, allows me one whale and one whale only. So I had to ask
the harpooners to stand down.

They didn’t take too kindly to this. Thesaurus, as noted
earlier, looks like a building. But I’d take my chances against him
any day rather than square off with Flarq. Only a good death,
Flarq said, would lift their crappy spirits. If not a whale, he said,
then he wanted to do in our captive one-armed pirate.
This idea drew cheers from the rest of the crew (consisting
of Duq the cook and deckhands Moses and Stupid George
(when he dove overboard in pursuit of the pirates, George
landed on a lower deck, where ten hours later we found him
unconscious)). Duq proposed a keel-hauling—that’s where you tie
up a guy and drag him under the full length of the hull so that
he’ll drown, if lucky, or be shredded by barnacles.
The pirate, whose name was Nelson (after the great Limey
Admiral Horatio Nelson of all things), had tried to shoot my
head off. In these waters, keel-hauling was a relatively merciful
reprisal. Still, it didn’t sit right in my gut. But if was I to oppose
it, the crew would’ve mutinied for sure.
So I asked Nelson if he had any last requests.
“Yeah,” he said, “I’d like to join your crew and help you
get your whale.”

Everyone was surprised. Me most of all. “Why?” I asked
him.

“I think your cause is noble,” he said, and the sincerity
he said it with was such that the crew’s hard features softened
some. “Also, I know these waters real good, and you seem
undermanned.” Indicating the stump where his left arm had
been, and then the one where my right’d hung before the
bastard chomped it off, he added, “I could be your right hand.”
At this, the men laughed, and their faces spoke the kind
of warmth for Nelson such brine-hardened folk can go a whole
lifetime without feeling. Still, though, they wanted to keel-haul
him. Thesaurus picked him up by the throat.
“One more thing,” Nelson begged. “I own a sporting
house.”

“Sporting house” is seafolk language for “brothel.”
Immediately, Thesaurus lowered Nelson to the deck, and the
others rushed over, hands extended, to welcome Nelson to the
crew.

I reckon that sometime during the voyage, Nelson will try
to murder us or worse. Still, all in all, he’s about as good a first
mate as I could’ve hoped to get.

But enough about him for now. A shrimper just radioed
that they sighted a pod of sperm a scant five leagues west, off the
coast of Venezuela, and one of the fish—the biggest—surfaced,
showing a scar between his eyes in the shape of a B as in bastard!

P.S. A self-scrimshaw of Flarq with his harpoon, which he takes
just about everywhere—almost. He leaves it outside men’s room
doors since recovering from the time he overestimated the ceiling
height of one of them.

Tuesday, 22 June 2004 3:55 PM
Life or Death or Both
    So we were bounding over whitecaps. Just a couple leagues west
of the pod. All of a sudden, something bobbing to starboard
glinted in the setting sun and caught Thesaurus’s eye. He
whipped out a scope, took a look-see, then hollered up to the
bridge for me to cut the engines so’s he could fish whatever it
was out of the water.

I figured it had to be something real valuable. It was