' By this time there were a dozen heads jammed
together, like bees swarming, over the two logs. 'She got a wound in
the Pacific! "Hallo!" says she; "this is no sea for a lady to live
in;" so she up helm, and right away across the pole into the Atlantic,
and met her death.'"
"Your story has an interest you little suspect, young gentleman. If
this is true, the northwest passage is proved."
"That has been proved a hundred times, sir, and in a hundred ways; the
only riddle is to find it. The man that tells you there is not a
northwest passage is no sailor, and the fish that can't find it is not
a whale; for there is not a young suckling no bigger than this room
that does not know that passage as well as a mid on his first voyage
knows the way to the mizzen-top through lubber's hole. How tired you
must be of whales, ladies?"
"Oh no."
"Kill us one more, David. I love bloodshed--to hear of."
"Well, now, I don't think that can be Miss Fountain's taste, to look
at her."
Then David. told them how he had fallen in with a sperm whale, dead of
disease, floating as high as a frigate; how, with a very light breeze,
the skipper had crept down toward her; how, at half a mile distance
the stench of her was severe, but, as they neared her, awful; then so
intolerable that the skipper gave the crew leave to go below and close
the lee ports. So there were but two men left on the brig's deck, and
a ship's company that a hurricane would not have driven from their
duty skulked before a foul smell; but such a smell! a smell that
struck a chill and a loathing to the heart, and soul, and marrow-bone;
a smell like the gases in a foul mine; "it would have suffocated us in
a few moments if we had been shut up along with it.
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