Classic Poem

The cruising ships had never claimed
So bold a captain, so far-famed
Throughout the fleets a master-whaler —
New England's pride was Martin Taylor.
'Twas in this fall of eighty-eight,
As skipper of the Albatross ,
He bore South from the Behring Strait,
Down by the China Coast, to cross
The Line, and with the fishing done
To head her for the homeward run
Around the Cape of Storms, and bring
Her to Nantucket by the Spring.
She had three thousand barrels stowed
Under the hatches, though she could,
Below and on her deck, have stood
Four thousand as her bumper load.
And so to try his final luck,
He entered Sunda Strait and struck
Into the Indian Ocean where,
According to reports that year,
A fleet had had grand fishing spells
Between the Cocos and Seychelles.
Thither he sailed; but many a day
Passed by in its unending way,
The weather fair, the weather rough,
With watch and sleep, with tack and reef,
With swab and holystone, salt beef
And its eternal partner, duff;
Now driving on with press of sail,
Now sweaty calms that drugged the men,
Everything but sight of whale,
Until one startling midday, when
A gesture in the rigging drew
The flagging tension of the crew.

In the cross-trees at the royal mast,
Shank, the third mate, was breathing fast,
His eyes stared at the horizon clouds,
His heels were kicking at the shrouds,
His cheeks were puffed, his throat was dry,
He seemed to be bawling at the sky.

" Hoy, you windjammer, what's the matter?
What's this infernal devil's clatter? "

" She blows, sir, there she blows, by thunder,
A sperm, a mighty big one, yonder. "

" Where-a-way? " was Taylor's scream.

" Ten miles, sir, on the looard beam! "

" Hard up and let her go like hell! "

With heeling side and heady toss,
Smothered in spray, the Albatross
Came free in answer to his yell
And corked off seven with a rout
Of roaring canvas crowding her,
Her jibs and royals bellying out,
With studsail, staysail, spinnaker.
The barque came to; the first mate roared
His orders, and the davits swung,
The block-sheaves creaked, and the men sprung
Into the boats as they were lowered.
With oars unshipped, and every sail,
Tub and harpoon and lance in trim,
The boats payed off before the gale,
Taylor leading; after him,
Old Wart, Gamaliel, and Shank —
Three mates in order of their rank.
The day was fine; 'twas two o'clock,
And in the north, three miles away,
Asleep since noon, and like a rock,
The towering bulk of the cachalot lay.

" Two hundred barrels to a quart, "
Gamaliel whispered to Old Wart.

" A bull, by gad, the biggest one
I've ever seen, " said Wart, " I'll bet'ee ,
He'll measure up a hundred ton,
And a thousand gallons of spermaceti. "

" Clew up your gab! "
" Let go that mast!
There'll be row enough when you get him fast. "

" Don't ship the oars! "
" Now, easy, steady;
You'll gally him with your bloody noise. "

The four harpooners standing ready
Within the bows, their blades in poise,
Two abaft and two broadside,
Arched and struck; the irons cut
Their razor edges through the hide
And penetrated to the gut.

" Stern all! and let the box-lines slip.
Stern! Sheer! " The boats backed up.
" Unship
That mast. Bend to and stow that sail,
And jam the pole under the thwart. "

With head uplifted the sperm whale
Made for the starboard boat of Wart,
Who managed with a desperate swing
To save his skiff the forehead blow,
But to be crushed with the backward swing
Of the flukes as the giant plunged below;
On this dead instant Taylor cleft
His line; the third mate's iron drew,
Which, for the sounding trial, left
But one boat with an iron true, —
The one that had Gamaliel in it.
The tubs ran out, Gamaliel reckoned
Two hundred fathoms to the minute;
Before the line had cleared the second,
He tied the drugg and quickly passed
The splice to Shank who made it fast,
And with ten blistering minutes gone,
Had but a moment left to toss
It to the fifth boat rushing on
With Hall fresh from the Albatross ,
Who when his skiff, capsizing, lay
So low he could no longer bail her,
Caught up the end for its last relay,
And flung it to the hands of Taylor.
With dipping bow and creaking thwart,
The skipper's whaleboat tore through tunnels
Of drifting foam, with listing gunwales,
Now to starboard, now to port,
The hemp ran through the leaden chock,
Making the casing searing hot;
The second oarsman snatched and shot
The piggin like a shuttlecock,
Bailing the swamping torrent out,
Or throwing sidelong spurts to dout
The flame when with the treble turn
The loggerhead began to burn.

A thousand fathoms down the lug
Of rope, harpoon, of boat and drugg,
Began, in half a breathless hour,
To get his wind and drain his power;
His throbbing valves demanded air,
The open sky, the sunlight there;
The downward plunging ceased, and now,
Taylor feeling the tarred hemp strand
Slackening that moment at the bow,
Began to haul hand over hand,
And pass it aft where it was stowed
Loose in the stern sheets, while the crew
After the sounding respite threw
Their bodies on the oars and rowed
In the direction of the pull.

" He blows! " The four whaleboats converged
On a point to southward where the bull
In a white cloud of mist emerged —
Terror of head and hump and brawn,
Silent and sinister and grey,
As in a lifting fog at dawn
Gibraltar rises from its bay.
With lateral crunching of his jaw,
And thunderous booming as his tail
Collided with a wave, the whale
Steamed up immediately he saw
The boats, lowered his cranial drum
And charged, his slaughterous eye on Shank;
The mate — his hour had not yet come —
Parried the head and caught the flank
With a straight iron running keen
Into the reaches of his spleen.
The boats rushed in, when Taylor backed,
Gamaliel leaped in and lodged
A thrust into his ribs, then dodged
The wallowing flukes when Hall attacked.
As killers bite and swordfish pierce
Their foes, a score of lances sank
Through blubber to the bone and drank
His blood with energy more fierce
Than theirs; nor could he shake them off
With that same large and sovereign scoff,
That high redundancy of ease
With which he smote his enemies.
He somersaulted, leaped, and sounded;
When he arose the whaleboats hounded
Him still; he tried gigantic breaches,
The irons stuck to him like leeches;
He made for open sea but found
The anchors faithful to their ground,
For, every surface run, he towed
The boat crews faster than they rowed.
Five hectic hours had now passed by,
Closing a tropic afternoon,
Now twilight with a mackerel sky,
And now a full and climbing moon.
'Twas time to end this vanity —
Hauling a puny batch of men,
With boat and cross-boards out to sea,
Tethered to his vitals, when
The line would neither break nor draw.
Where was his pride, too, that his race
Should claim one fugitive in a chase?
His teeth were sound within his jaw,
His thirty feet of forehead still
Had all their pristine power to kill.
He swung his bulk round to pursue
This arrogant and impious crew.
He took his own good time, not caring
With such persistent foes to crush
Them by a self-destroying rush,
But blending cunning with his daring,
He sought to mesh them in the toil
Of a rapid moving spiral coil,
Baffling the steersmen as they plied
Their oars now on the windward side,
Now hard-a-lee, forcing them dead
Upon the foam line of his head.
And when the narrowing orbit shrank
In width to twice his spinal length,
He put on all his speed and strength
And turned diagonally on Shank.
The third mate's twenty years of luck
Were ended as the cachalot struck
The boat amidship, carrying it
With open sliding jaws that bit
The keel and sawed the gunwales through,
Leaving behind him as he ploughed
His way along a rising cloud,
Fragments of oars and planks and crew.
Another charge and the death knell
Was rung upon Gamaliel;
At the same instant Hall ran foul
Of the tail sweep, but not before
A well directed iron tore
Three feet into the lower bowel.

Two foes were now left on the sea —
The Albatross with shortened sail
Was slatting up against the gale;
Taylor manaeuvring warily
Between the rushes and the rough
Wave hazards of the crest and trough,
Now closed and sent a whizzing dart
Underneath the pectoral fin
That pierced the muscle of the heart.
The odds had up to this been equal —
Whale and wind and sea with whaler —
But, for the sperm, the fighting sequel
Grew darker with that thrust of Taylor.
From all his lesser wounds the blood
That ran from him had scarcely spent
A conscious tithe of power; the flood
That issued from this fiery rent,
Broaching the arterial tide,
Had left a ragged worm of pain
Which crawled like treason to his brain, —
The worm of a Titan's broken pride!
Was he — with a toothless Bowhead's fate,
Slain by a thing called a second mate —
To come in tow to the whaler's side?
Be lashed like a Helot to the bitts
While, from the cutting stage, the spade
Of a harpooner cut deep slits
Into his head and neck, and flayed
Him to the bone; while jesters spat
Upon his carcass, jeered and wrangled
About his weight, the price his fat
Would bring, as with the heavy haul
Of the blocks his strips of blubber dangled
At every click of the windlass pawl?
An acrid torture in his soul
Growing with the tragic hurry
Of the blood stream through that widening hole
Presaged a sperm whale's dying flurry —
That orgy of convulsive breath,
Abhorred thing before the death,
In which the maniac threads of life
Are gathered from some wild abysm,
Stranded for a final strife
Then broken in a paroxysm.
Darkness and wind began to pour
A tidal whirlpool round the spot,
Where the clotted nostrils' roar
Sounded from the cachalot
A deep bay to his human foes.
He settled down to hide his track,
Sighted the keels, then swiftly rose,
And with the upheaval of his back,
Caught with annihilating rip
The boat, then with the swelling throes
Of death levied for the attack,
Made for the port bow of the ship.
All the tonnage, all the speed,
All the courage of his breed,
The pride and anger of his breath,
The battling legions of his blood
Met in that unresisted thud,
Smote in that double stroke of death.
Ten feet above and ten below
The water-line his forehead caught her,
The hatches opening to the blow
His hundred driving tons had wrought her;
The capstan and the anchor fled,
When bolts and stanchions swept asunder,
For what was iron to that head,
And oak — in that hydraulic thunder?
Then, like a royal retinue,
The slow processional of crew,
Of inundated hull, of mast,
Halliard and shroud and trestle-cheek,
Of yard and topsail to the last
Dank flutter of the ensign as a wave
Closed in upon the skysail peak,
Followed the Monarch to his grave.