The Project Gutenberg EBook of John Frewen, South Sea Whaler, by Louis Becke

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Title: John Frewen, South Sea Whaler
1904

Author: Louis Becke

Release Date: March 11, 2008 [EBook #24806]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOHN FREWEN, SOUTH SEA WHALER ***

Produced by David Widger

JOHN FREWEN, SOUTH SEA WHALER

From "Chinkie's Flat And Other Stories"

By Louis Becke

Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company 1904

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

Captain Ethan Keller, of the _Casilda_ of Nantucket, was in a very bad
temper, for in four days he had lost two of the five boats the barque
carried--one had been hopelessly stove by the dreaded "underclip" given
her by a crafty old bull sperm-whale, and the other, which was in charge
of the second mate, had not been seen for seventy hours. When last
sighted she was fast to the same bull which had destroyed the first
mate's boat; it was then nearly dark, and the whale, which was of an
enormous size, although he had three irons in his body and was towing
the whole length of line from the stove-in boat as well as that of the
second mate, was racing through the water as fresh as when he had first
been struck, three hours previously. Then the sun dipped below the
sea-rim, and the blue Pacific was shrouded in darkness.

"Why in thunder couldn't the dunderhead put a bomb into that fish before
it came on dark?" growled the skipper to his other officers, as they
sat down to a harried sapper in the spacious, old-fashioned cabin of the
whaler.

No one answered. Frewen, the missing officer, was as good a whaleman
as ever drove an iron or gripped the haft of a steer-oar, and his
half-caste boatsteerer Randall Cheyne was the best on the ship. But
there was bad blood between young Frewen and his captain, and Cheyne was
the cause of it.

"If they cut and lose that whale," resumed Keller presently, "I'll haze
the life out of them--by thunder, I will, if I break my back in doing
it! Why, that is the biggest fish we've struck yet. If I had been in
that boat, I'd have had that whale in his flurry two hours ago. Why, it
appears to me that Frewen g