Jack Mason, the Old Sailor | Page 4

began to grow faint. At last he went so slow, that we rowed up to him,
and stabbed him with a long knife. He died pretty soon after that, and
we got more than two hundred barrels of oil out of him.
Catching whales seems a cruel business to you. It is a cruel business. I
never liked it. But somebody must do it. The butcher who kills oxen,
and sheep, and calves, has to be cruel. But we must have butchers. We
must have people to kill whales, though you never will catch me
chasing after a whale again, as long as my name is Jack Mason.
Whales do not always run like the one I have told you about.
Sometimes they fight. After they are struck with the harpoon, they lift
their tail, or fluke, as they call it, and strike the boat so hard as to dash it

in pieces. Then the poor sailors have to swim to the ship if they can. If
they cannot, and if there is no other boat near them that they can get
into, they must drown.
I once saw a whale that had been struck with a harpoon come up close
to the ship, and give it such a blow with his fluke, that he tore the
copper off at a great rate, and broke a thick plank in half a dozen
pieces.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: The Indian, with his bow and arrows.]

MORE INDIANS.
When I went in the whale-ship, I saw another tribe of Indians, that were
very different from those I told you of before. They knew more than
those Indians. They used bows and arrows; and you would have been
pleased to see how they would hit a mark a great way off, with their
arrows.
One of them, who had a name so long that I will not try to speak it,
used to come every day to our ship, when we were lying near the shore.
He liked pieces of glass, and nails and tin, and things of that kind, quite
as well as the other Indians I told you of. He had seen white men before,
so he was not at all afraid of us. I suppose that almost all the white men
he had seen before used rum and tobacco. He asked all our sailors for
these two things, and kept asking every day. I am sorry to say that some
of the men gave him some rum once in a while, and one day he drank
so much that he got drunk. Poor man! He was not so much to blame, I
think, as the bad sailors that gave him the rum. What do you think
about it?
This man would dive in the water further than anybody I ever saw
before or since. Some of the sailors used to throw pieces of tin into
very deep water, and tell him he might have them if he would dive and
bring them up. He was so fond of such things, that he would always

gladly dive to get them.
I once saw him dive for an old worn-out knife. The water was very
deep where it was thrown. It was so deep that none of us thought he
would get it. He went down, and staid a long, long time. We thought he
never would come up again. The sailor that threw the knife into the
water began to be sorry he had done it, because he thought the poor
Indian was drowned. But, by and by, he came up again, with the knife
in his mouth. He had been hunting after the knife on the bottom of the
sea.
These Indians had boats which were made of the bark of trees. They
were so light, that an Indian could carry one of them on his shoulder.
The man who used to come to the ship so often, brought his little girl
with him one day. She was not more than six or seven years old. She
had never seen any white men before, and at first she was afraid of us
all. But when she saw that the white folks would not hurt her any more
than the Indians would, she liked us very well, and wanted to stay with
us all the time. The captain showed her his watch, and she looked at it a
long time. She thought she had never seen so strange a thing before. "Is
it alive?" she asked her father. He could not tell whether it was alive or
not, any more than the little girl could.
The captain liked the little girl very well. He wanted to take her home
with him. So he asked her father if his little girl might go a great