Chapter 27

IN WHICH THE SEA SPELL GOES ASHORE ON A MOST UNFRIENDLY COAST

I learned a whole lot beside seamanship during those next few weeks as the schooner Sea Spell coasted Buenos Ayres Province and the vast Colonial Territory of Magellan. A stretch of nearly a thousand miles we had to sail to reach the Cape of the Virgins, behind which is the entrance to the Magellan Straits.

The coastwise trade between the ports below Buenos Ayres--Bahia Blanca, El Carmen on the Rio Negro, Port St. Antonio at at the head of the Gulf of St. Matias, San Josefpen, Por Malaspina, Santa Cruz, and clear around to the Pacific seaports of Chili--this coastwise trade, I say, is almost like the trade along our Atlantic seaboard. Inland, Tugg told me, there were vast pampasses empty of all but cattle and wild beasts and some tribes of wild men; but a strip of the seacoast south of the mouth of the Silver River is being rapidly developed.

There are great rivers emptying into the sea here,--the Cobu Leofu, Rio Negro, the Balchitas, the Chupat Desire and Rio Chico--all water-ways which are opening up the country. Argentina is as large as all Eastern and Central Europe together and is enormously rich in mineral and natural products.

This information was brought home to me as, day after day, and with favorable gales, the Sea Spell winged her way southward. She was a fairly fast sailing ship and Captain Adoniram Tugg evidently took pride in her. But her crew was all that he had given me reason to believe. A dirtier, more ungovernable gang of penny cut-throats I doubt never sailed on any honest ship!

I soon learned, beside all the above about Argentina's coast trade, that Tugg kept his seamen at work through fear. He never changed his drawl in speaking; but when he gave an order there was a grimness about his mouth and a flash in his gray-blue eyes that gave one a cold, creepy feeling in the region of the spine. I don't know that Captain Tugg went armed. But if an order had been neglected by any man aboard I had the feeling that a weapon would appear in the skipper's hand and that the mutineer would have dropped in his tracks!

Pedro, the mate, was a snaky, dusky fellow, with huge rings of gold in his ears and a smile that showed altogether too many teeth to be pleasant--a regular alligator smile. As far as I could see, I would just as lief have Pedro's ill feeling as his friendship. Yet Tugg trusted him implicitly. But I--I locked my stateroom door whenever I lay down to sleep; and I kept the Winchester and the Colts revolver loaded all the time. Perhaps I was foolish; but I felt that we were in a state of war.

The routine duties of the schooner kept me at work, however, for I tried to earn my sixteen a month. Tugg was a good navigator himself. He handled his schooner like a professional yachtsman. Captain Rogers would have admired the man, for he was another skipper who did not believe in lying hove to no matter how hard the wind blew. There was a week at a stretch when I didn't get thoroughly dry between watches. The Sea Spell just about flew over the water instead of through it!

But a calm fell thereafter and we lay for eighteen hours in the Bay of St. George, the sails hanging dead with not a breath of wind, and the sea like glass. We were within two rifle shots of the shore at one point. Behind this point of rocks was an inlet and the pool made good anchorage without doubt, for there were several sail there, and a jumble of huts on the shore.

We had seen whales for several days and once passed a whaleship at work trying out; but it was not the Scarboro. Now a great whale swam calmly past the Sea Spell, nosing in toward the land, probably following some school of tiny fish upon which he was feeding.

"Wisht I had a crew of bully boys to go after that critter," sighed Captain Tugg, behind his long cheroot. "He'll make more'n a bucket o' ile, you bet!"

"You wouldn't want to litter up your tidy schooner with grease, sir," said I, in wonder.

"Mebbe not; mebbe not. But money's good wherever you find it, and that critter is wuth two or three thousand dollars. By the e-tar-nal snakes!" he added, using his favorite expletive, "I'd love to stick an iron in that carcass."

I knew that Adoniram Tugg had been almost everything in the line of sea-going and was not surprised to find that he had driven the iron into many a whale. We stood swapping experiences, idly watching the big whale. The creature sounded and remained down twenty or thirty minutes. When he came up he spouted three times in quick succession, and then lay basking on the surface.

"Looker there!" exclaimed Captain Tugg, suddenly. "By the e-tar-nal snakes! looker there!"

He was pointing at the whale. Up towards its head, on the port side, there appeared on the water a long tail, or fin, at right angles with the whale.

"What in tarnation d'ye s'pose that critter is?" demanded Captain Tugg.

The thing was all of four and twenty feet long, about two wide at the upper end, and tapering to eighteen inches. Almost at once the living club was elevated in the air and then was flung down across the whale's back--just behind where the head was attached to its body--with a noise like a signal gun.

"Will ye looker that now!" bawled the Captain, in wonder.

Again and again the monstrous club rose and descended. The great whale leaped like a beaten horse under the rain of blows; but whichever way it turned, it could not shake off its assailant. The operator of that club seemed to have it under perfect control, and likewise had means of keeping up with the victim no matter in which direction, or how fast, the latter swam. The blows fell only a few seconds apart, and the whale finally sounded to escape them.

But when he came up again, there was the mysterious enemy, hanging to the whale like a bull dog, and the beating re-commenced. The sea about the hectored whale was tinged with blood. The creature's back was lacerated frightfully and without any doubt whatsoever, it was being beaten to death by its antagonist.

Tugg grew greatly excited, and ordered a boat lowered. We took four sailors and left Pedro in command of the becalmed schooner, and rowed off towards the scene of the battle between the whale and the mysterious fish.

"It must be some kind of a huge ray," I suggested. "That's the tail that is being used like a club."

"By the e-tar-nal snakes!" exploded Tugg, "it's a different kind of a sea-bat from anything I ever seed or heard of. You take it from me, that's a sea-sarpint, or wuss!"

The whale was evidently at its last gasp when we left the schooner. It soon rolled over on its side. The mysterious flail stopped beating the huge body and the water seemed churned excitedly at the nose of the leviathan.

"The porpoises have got at it," I suggested.

"Not much they ain't," returned Captain Tugg. "There ain't no porpoises around today. Whatever the critter is that killed the whale, it's at dinner now."

And it was true. The mysterious denizen of the deep that had beaten the whale to death, ate out the huge mammal's tongue and had sunk again into the sea before we rowed near enough to distinguish its shape or size. It had disappeared as mysteriously as it had risen and seemingly all it had killed the mammal for was to eat its tongue.

Captain Tugg's eye glistened when he saw the proportions of that whale closer to. He stood up, looked long towards the inlet where there seemed to be some movement among the craft anchored there, and then ordered us to row in close to the whale's tail.

He passed a hawser around the narrow part of the whale just forward of the tail and then ordered the men to pull for the schooner. It was a tug, now I tell you! but we got the whale to the Sea Spell after a while. I expected to see the spick and span schooner all messed up with try-out works, and grease, and smoke. It disgusted me that the Yankee skipper should be so sharp after the Almighty Dollar. But I didn't yet know Captain Adoniram Tugg.

I saw that a number of craft had started out of the inlet--a much puffing steam tug ahead, drawing several smaller boats behind it. There was no wind at all, so the fleet approached slowly, and we had the whale tackled to the Sea Spell, fore and aft, before the tug was very near.

We made no immediate attempt to butcher the whale and I took pains to get some of its dimensions. It was eighty-two feet over all in length and nearly sixty feet around the biggest part of the body. The lower jaw was nineteen and one-half feet long and the tail, when it was expanded, measured twenty-three feet. I suppose, through the thickest part of the body it must have been as many feet as the expanded tail was wide; at least, so it appeared. These measurements will give the reader some idea of what these huge mammals look like. And Captain Tugg had not been far out of the way when he declared the whale to be worth two thousand dollars.

"What you got to run oil into, sir?" I asked, curiously.

"Wait a bit; wait a bit," returned the Yankee, puffing on his cheroot. "Let's see what these Yaller-skins have to offer. If we hadn't tailed onto the whale as we did they'd had their hooks in it by this time."

A few words in Spanish to Pedro had stirred up the mate and crew of the Sea Spell. They seemed wonderfully busy getting a lot of gear and litter upon deck. The uninitiated might have thought that we were getting ready to cut up the whale and boil down the blubber in the most approved style.

Finally a man aboard the tug hailed us. Captain Tugg answered in Spanish, and an excited conversation ensued--at least, excited upon the side of the man aboard the steam vessel and his compatriots. The skipper of the Sea Spell seemed particularly calm and unshaken. I could understand but little of the talk, although I had begun to pick up the bastard Spanish spoken along the coast. I knew the Yankee and the dagos were bargaining.

Finally Tugg sang out to Pedro to belay the work he and the crew were engaged in, and to lower a boat again. The captain was rowed to the tug and after some further conversation I saw certain moneys counted out and paid over to the master of the Sea Spell. He was then rowed back and when he was aboard he ordered the dead whale cast off.

"And git some of your watch down there, Pedro," added Captain Tugg, "and swab the grease off her side. Ugh! There ain't nothing nastier than a whale."

"Yet you were going to cut her up?" I suggested, curiously.

He favored me with a wink. "Buncome, Bluff," he murmured. "That little play-acting turned me two hundred dollars in gold. Our lying becalmed here wasn't such a bad thing after all--and here comes the breeze. Jest like finding money in an old coat, Mr. Webb--that's what that was."

And so the shrewd old fellow turned everything to account. We got a breeze and were out of sight of the place before the small craft had got the big whale towed into the inlet--where they would beach it and cut it up. Captain Adoniram Tugg was two hundred dollars in pocket, and just because some mysterious sea-beast had seen fit to kill a whale for its tongue!

We had a fine breeze after the long calm, but nothing but fair weather until we rounded the Cape of the Virgins. There the broad entrance of the magnificent Straits of Magellan lay before the nose of the schooner. A little later we had furled all but the topsails and were sailing due north into an inlet masked by many dangerous looking reefs. The mate of the Sea Spell, Pedro, seemed to know the channel well, however, and although Adoniram Tugg remained on deck he did not seem to be worried at all about the schooner's safety.

"We'll drop anchor before morning," he told me. "That is, if the wind holds in the same quarter. You'll have a chance to see what sort of a good fellow the Professor is tomorrow."

"What! are we so near your headquarters?"

"That's the checker," returned Tugg. "Just a short sail now."

The inlet was never more than a mile wide; in places the rocks crowded in toward the channel until a strong man could have flung a stone from shore to shore. The waterway was really a series of quiet salt pools.

The shores were wild and rugged. I had never seen a more forbidding coast. When the night dropped down upon us--as it did suddenly, and a starless sky o'er-head--I wondered how Pedro could smell his way through. I heard Tugg roaring something in Spanish about "the beacon" and then a spark of fire flared out in the darkness far ahead. It looked like a stationary lamp and burned brightly. The captain came over to me, chuckling.

"That's my partner's light," he said, with satisfaction. "He rigged that beacon, and it's lit every night that the Sea Spell is on a cruise. Pedro can work the schooner up the inlet by that light without rubbing a hair."

And so we sailed on, and on, without a thought of danger until, of a sudden, I felt the schooner jar throughout her whole length. Captain Tugg jumped and yelled to Pedro:

"What in tarnation you doin', numbskull? Hi, one o' you boys! git into the chains with the lead."

But before the man could sound the Sea Spell grounded again, and this time she ran her keel upon a sand bank so solidly that she stopped dead, with the sails above cracking! There was a hullabaloo for a few minutes, now I tell you. Shouts, commands, the grinding of the schooner's keel, the slatting of sails. The Sea Spell had driven so hard and fast upon the shoal that she canted neither to port, or starboard. And although the sea was still so that she would not be beaten by the waves, it looked much to me as though she were piled up on this unfriendly coast for good and all!