'Beat to quarters, Mr Rispin,' Drinkwater said it quietly, watching the young officer's reaction. He noted the surprise and the hesitation and then the acknowledgement.
Pipes squealed again and the marine drummer began to beat the rafale. Men ran to their stations and knelt by the guns, the officers and midshipmen drew their dirks and swords and the gun-captains raised their hands as their guns became ready.
'Sail trimmers, Mr Hill. We'll heave-to and fire a broadside ahead of the leading whales!' Hill was at his station and had relieved Rispin. There was now an economy of orders as Hill deployed the men chosen to trim the Melusine's sails and spars in action. Bourne too was beside him, ready to pass orders to the batteries. 'Load ball, Mr Bourne, all guns at maximum depression, both broadsides to be ready.'
'Aye, aye, sir.'
Melusine had entered the lead now. On either side the backs of whales still emerged, their huge tails slowly thrusting the water as they drove majestically along. Beyond the whales, close to larboard and some miles distant to starboard, the ice edge glittered in the sunlight, full of diamond brilliants shading to blue shadows with green slime along the waterline.
He was aware of Mr Singleton on the quarterdeck. 'Should you not be at your station?' he asked mildly.
'I beg your pardon, sir, I took it to be another of these interminable manoeuvres that…'
'Never mind, never mind. You may watch now you are here.'
Singleton turned to see Meetuck pointing excitedly from the fo'c's'le as a female whale rolled luxuriously on her side, exposing her nipple for her calf. 'It seems scarcely right to kill these magnificent creatures,' he muttered to himself, remembering the Benedicite. The mother and calf fell astern.
'Down helm, Mr Hill, you may heave the ship to…' There were more orders and Melusine swung to starboard, easing her speed through the water to a standstill.
'Larboard battery! Make ready!' The arms went up and he nodded to Bourne.
'Fire!'
The broadside erupted in smoke and flame with a roar that made the ears tingle. The balls raised splashes, a cable to leeward where two big whales had been seen. Through the drifting smoke Drinkwater saw one huge fluke lift itself for a moment as the whale dived, but he had no idea whether he had reversed its course.
'Reload!' There was a furious and excited activity along the larboard waist. There was nothing to compare with firing their brute artillery that so delighted the men, officers and ratings alike.
'You may give them another broadside, Mr Bourne.'
Again the arms went up and again the shots dropped ahead of the whales. Drinkwater turned to starboard, to look back up the strait. The whalers were three miles away and between them and the Melusine was a most extraordinary sight. The sea seemed to boil with action. He could see more than a dozen boats. Three were under tow by harpooned whales, others were in the act of striking, their harpooners up in the bows as the tense steersmen brought their flimsy oars into the mass of whales that had now taken alarm and were swimming south-west, along the line of the lead. Beyond these two boats crews were lancing their catches, probing for the lives of the great beasts as their victims rolled and thrashed the water with their great tails. Through his glass Drinkwater could see the foam of their death agonies tinged with blood. A few flags were up on dead carcases and these were either under tow to the whalers or awaiting the few boats that could be spared for this task.
Drinkwater saw at once that he could not fire his starboard guns without endangering the boats but their crews were excitedly awaiting the order that would send their shot in amongst the whales.
'By God,' he heard Walmsley mutter to Glencross, 'this is better than partridge.'
'Secure the starboard guns, Mr Bourne, and draw the charges!' He heard the mutter of disappointment from the starbowlines. 'Silence there!'
A new danger suddenly occurred to him. The sloop lay in the path of the advancing animals. The death of some of their number had communicated an alarm to the others and their motion was full of turbulent urgency. He did not wish to think what effect one of those bluff heads would have upon Melusine's hull. 'Haul the mainyard, Mr Hill and put the ship before the wind…' Hill grasped the sudden danger and Melusine turned slowly to larboard as she again gathered headway. She had hardly swung, presenting her stern to the onrushing whales when their attention was attracted by shouts to the south, to larboard. One of the boats that had been fast to a fish had been dashed to fragments on the ice edge two miles away as the tortured beast had dived under the ice. The alarm had been raised by another boat, towing past Melusine's stern, who hailed the sloop to request her rendering assistance and allowing them to hold onto their whale. It was while clearing away the quarterboat that the whale struck them. A large gravid female in the last stages of her pregnancy had been terrified by the slaughter astern of her. The ship shook and the stunned animal rolled out from under the quarter, almost directly beneath the boat. Her astonished crew, half-way down to the water's surface looked down into the tiny eye of the monster. The whale spouted, then dived, her flukes hitting the keel of the suspended boat but not upsetting it.
A few minutes later, under the command of Acting Lieutenant Gorton the boat was pulling across a roil of water, avoiding the retreating whales with difficulty, on her way to rescue the crew of the smashed whale-boat. It did not appear that Melusine had suffered any damage from the collision.
The whalers hunted their quarry for fifty hours while the sun culminated and then began its slow unfinished setting, its azimuth altering round the horizon to rise again to each of two successive noons. Melusine was quite unable to stem the escape of the whales and in the end Drinkwater agreed to the boats securing their captured whales to her sides.
'As fenders!' Harvey had hailed, his eyes dark and sunken in his head with the fatigue of the chase, 'in case the ice closes on you!' The jest was made as he went in pursuit of his eighth whale, his cargo almost complete. Now the five ships lay secured along the ice edge on the northern side of the lead, tied up as though moored to a quay, their head and stern lines secured to ice anchors. Each had a pair of whales alongside, between hull and ice, while rafted outboard in tier after tier lay the remainder of the catch. While Melusine's company stood watch, the exhausted whalers turned below to sleep before the flensing began. They had taken more than thirty whales between them and the labour of cutting up the blubber and packing it in casks took a further two days of strenuous effort.
Melusine's midshipmen went out on the ice with Mount and a party of marines and took some more seals, returning to the ship to pick off the brown sharks that clustered round the whale corpses as they sank after flensing. The fine weather held and the whale-captains expressed their good fortune, accepting an invitation to dine with Drinkwater the instant the flensing was completed. Even Sawyers seemed to be un-Quakerishly cheerful, and Drinkwater, anticipating an early departure from the Greenland Sea, ordered Tregembo to get Palgrave's carvers, silver and plate out of storage.