Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (37 page)

“That seems to me exaggeration. These creatures are only balænopterons, provided with dorsal fins; and, like the cachalots, are generally much smaller than the Greenland whale.”

“Ah!” exclaimed the Canadian, whose eyes had never left the ocean. “They are coming nearer; they are in the same water as the
Nautilus!”

Then returning to the conversation, he said:

“You spoke of the cachalot as a small creature. I have heard of gigantic ones. They are intelligent cetacea. It is said of some that they cover themselves with seaweed and fucus, and then are taken for islands. People encamp upon them, and settle there; light a fire—”

“And build houses,” said Conseil.

“Yes, joker,” said Ned Land. “And one fine day the creature plunges, carrying with it all the inhabitants to the bottom of the sea:”

“Something like the travels of Sindbad the Sailor,” I replied, laughing.

“Ah!” suddenly exclaimed Ned Land. “It is not one whale; there are ten—there are twenty—it is a whole troop! And I not able to do anything! Hands and feet tied!”

“But, friend Ned;” said Conseil, “why do you not ask Captain Nemo’s permission to chase them? ”

Conseil had not finished his sentence when Ned Land had lowered himself through the panel to seek the captain. A few minutes afterward the two appeared together on the platform.

Captain Nemo watched the troop of cetacea playing on the waters about a mile from the
Nautilus.

“They are southern whales,” said he; “there goes the fortune of a whole fleet of whalers.”

“Well, sir,” asked the Canadian, “can I not chase them, if only to remind me of my old trade of harpooner?”

“And to what purpose?” replied Captain Nemo. “Only to destroy! We have nothing to do with whale-oil on board.”

“But, sir,” continued the Canadian, “in the Red Sea you allowed us to follow the dugong.”

“Then it was to procure fresh meat for my crew. Here it would be killing for killing’s sake. I know that is a privilege reserved for man, but I do not approve of such murderous pastime. In destroying the southern whale (like the Greenland whale, an inoffensive creature), your traders do a culpable action, Master Land. They have already depopulated the whole of Baffin’s Bay, and are annihilating a class of useful animals. Leave the unfortunate cetacea alone. They have plenty of natural enemies—cachalots, swordfish, and sawfish—without
your
troubling them.”

The captain was right. The barbarous and inconsiderate greed of these fishermen will one day cause the disappearance of the last whale in the ocean. Ned Land whistled “Yankee Doodle” between his teeth, thrust his hands into his pockets, and turned his back upon us. But Captain Nemo watched the troop of cetacea, and addressing me said:

“I was right in saying that whales had natural enemies enough, without counting man. These will have plenty to do before long. Do you see, M. Aronnax, about eight miles to leeward, those blackish moving points?”

“Yes, captain,” I replied.

“Those are cachalots—terrible animals, which I have sometimes met in troops of two or three hundred. As to
those,
they are cruel, mischievous creatures; they would be right in exterminating them.”

The Canadian turned quickly at the last words.

“Well, captain,” said he, “it is still time, in the interest of the whales.”

“It is useless to expose one’s self, professor. The
Nautilus
will disperse them. It is armed with a steel spur as good as Master Land’s harpoon, I imagine.”

The Canadian did not put himself out enough to shrug his shoulders. Attack cetacea with blows of a spur! Who had ever heard of such a thing?

“Wait, M. Aronnax,” said Captain Nemo. “We will show you something you have never yet seen. We have no pity for these ferocious creatures. They are nothing but mouth and teeth.”

Mouth and teeth! No one could better describe the macrocephalous cachalot, which is sometimes more than seventy-five feet long. Its enormous head occupies one-third of its entire body. Better armed than the whale, whose upper jaw is furnished only with whale-bone, it is supplied with twenty-five large tusks, about eight inches long, cylindrical and conical at the top, each weighing two pounds. It is in the upper part of this enormous head, in great cavities divided by cartilages, that is to be found from six to eight hundred pounds of that precious oil called spermaceti. The cachalot is a disagreeable creature, more tadpole than fish, according to Fredol’s description. It is badly formed, the whole of its left side being (if we may say it) a “failure,” and being only able to see with its right eye. But the formidable troop was nearing us. They had seen the whales and were preparing to attack them. One could judge beforehand that the cachalots would be victorious, not only because they were better built for attack than their inoffensive adversaries, but also because they could remain longer underwater without coming to the surface. There was only just time to go to the help of the whales. The
Nautilus
went underwater. Conseil, Ned Land, and I took our places before the window in the saloon, and Captain Nemo joined the pilot in his cage to work his apparatus as an engine of destruction. Soon I felt the beatings of the screw quicken, and our speed increased. The battle between the cachalots and the whales had already begun when the
Nautilus
arrived. They did not at first show any fear at the sight of this new monster joining in the conflict. But they soon had to guard against its blows. What a battle! The
Nautilus
was nothing but a formidable harpoon, brandished by the hand of its captain. It hurled itself against the fleshy mass, passing through from one part to the other, leaving behind it two quivering halves of the animal. It could not feel the formidable blows from their tails upon its sides, nor the shock which it produced itself, much more. One cachalot killed, it ran at the next, tacked on the spot that it might not miss its prey, going forward and backward, answering to its helm, plunging when the cetacean dived into the deep waters, coming up with it when it returned to the surface, striking it front or sideways, cutting or tearing in all directions, and at any pace, piercing it with its terrible spur. What carnage! What a noise on the surface of the waves! What sharp hissing, and what snorting peculiar to these enraged animals! In the midst of these waters generally so peaceful their tails made perfect billows. For one hour this wholesale massacre continued, from which the cachalots could not escape. Several times ten or twelve united tried to crush the
Nautilus
by their weight. From the window we could see their enormous mouths studded with tusks, and their formidable eyes. Ned Land could not contain himself, he threatened and swore at them. We could feel them clinging to our vessel like dogs worrying a wild boar in a copse. But the
Nautilus,
working its screw, carried them here and there, or to the upper levels of the ocean, without caring for their enormous weight, nor the powerful strain on the vessel. At length, the mass of cachalots broke up, the waves became quiet, and I felt that we were rising to the surface. The panel opened, and we hurried on to the platform. The sea was covered with mutilated bodies. A formidable explosion could not have divided and torn this fleshy mass with more violence. We were floating amid gigantic bodies, bluish on the back and white underneath, covered with enormous protuberances. Some terrified cachalots were flying toward the horizon. The waves were dyed red for several miles, and the
Nautilus
floated in a sea of blood. Captain Nemo joined us.

“Well, Master Land?” said he.

“Well, sir,” replied the Canadian, whose enthusiasm had somewhat calmed; “it is a terrible spectacle, certainly. But I am not a butcher. I am a hunter, and I call this a butchery.”

“It is a massacre of mischievous creatures,” replied the captain; “and the
Nautilus
is not a butcher’s knife.”

“I like my harpoon better,” said the Canadian.

“Everyone to his own,” answered the captain, looking fixedly at Ned Land.

I feared he would commit some act of violence, which would end in sad consequences. But his anger was turned by the sight of a whale which the
Nautilus
had just come up with. The creature had not quite escaped from the cachalot’s teeth. I recognized the southern whale by its flat head, which is entirely black. Anatomically, it is distinguished from the white whale and the North Cape whale by the seven cervical vertebrae, and it has two more ribs than its congeners. The unfortunate cetacean was lying on its side, riddled with holes from the bites, and quite dead. From its mutilated fin still hung a young whale which it could not save from the massacre. Its open mouth let the water flow in and out, murmuring like the waves breaking on the shore. Captain Nemo steered close to the corpse of the creature. Two of his men mounted its side, and I saw, not without surprise, that they were drawing from its breasts all the milk which they contained, that is to say, about two or three tons. The captain offered me a cup of the milk, which was still warm. I could not help showing my repugnance to the drink; but he assured me that it was excellent, and not to be distinguished from cow’s milk. I tasted it, and was of his opinion. It was a useful reserve to us, for in the shape of salt butter or cheese it would form an agreeable variety from our ordinary food. From that day I noticed with uneasiness that Ned Land’s ill-will toward Captain Nemo increased, and I resolved to watch the Canadian’s gestures closely.

THE
NAUTILUS
WAS STEADILY pursuing its southerly course, following the fiftieth meridian with considerable speed. Did he wish to reach the pole? I did not think so, for every attempt to reach that point had hitherto failed. Again the season was far advanced; for in the antarctic regions the 13th of March corresponds with the 13th of September of northern regions, which begins at the equinoctial season. On the 14th of March I saw floating ice in latitude 55°, merely pale bits of debris from twenty to twenty-five feet long, forming banks over which the sea curled. The
Nautilus
remained on the surface of the ocean. Ned Land, who had fished in the arctic seas, was familiar with its icebergs; but Conseil and I admired them for the first time. In the atmosphere toward the southern horizon stretched a white dazzling band. English whalers had given it the name of “ice blink.”
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However thick the clouds may be, it is always visible, and announces the presence of an ice-pack or bank. Accordingly, larger blocks soon appeared, whose brilliancy changed with the caprices of the fog. Some of these masses showed green veins, as if long undulating lines had been traced with sulphate of copper; others resembled enormous amethysts with the light shining through them. Some reflected the light of day upon a thousand crystal facets. Others shaded with vivid calcareous reflections resembled a perfect town of marble. The more we neared the south the more these floating islands increased both in number and importance.

At the sixtieth degree of latitude, every pass had disappeared. But seeking carefully, Captain Nemo soon found a narrow opening, through which he boldly slipped, knowing, however, that it would close behind him. Thus, guided by this clever hand, the
Nautilus
passed through all the ice with a precision which quite charmed Conseil; icebergs or mountains, ice-fields or smooth plains, seeming to have no limits, drift ice or floating ice-packs, or plains broken up, called palches when they are circular, and streams when they are made up of long strips. The temperature was very low; the thermometer exposed to the air marked two or three degrees below zero, but we were warmly clad with fur, at the expense of the sea bear and seal. The interior of the
Nautilus,
warmed regularly by its electric apparatus, defied the most intense cold. Besides, it would only have been necessary to go some yards beneath the waves to find a more bearable temperature. Two months earlier we should have had perpetual daylight in these latitudes; but already we had three or four hours night, and by and by there would be six months of darkness in these circumpolar regions. On the 15th of March we were in the latitude of New Shetland and South Orkney. The captain told me that formerly numerous tribes of seals inhabited them; but that English and American whalers, in their rage for destruction, massacred both old and young; thus where there was once life and animation, they had left silence and death.

About eight o’clock on the morning of the 16th of March, the
Nautilus,
following the fifty-fifth meridian, cut the antarctic polar circle. Ice surrounded us on all sides, and closed the horizon. But Captain Nemo went from one opening to another, still going higher. I cannot express my astonishment at the beauties of these new regions. The ice took most surprising forms. Here the grouping formed an Oriental town, with innumerable mosques and minarets, there a fallen city thrown to the earth, as it were, by some convulsion of nature. The whole aspect was constantly changed by the oblique rays of the sun, or lost in the grayish fog amid hurricanes of snow. Detonations and falls were heard on all sides, great overthrows of icebergs, which altered the whole landscape like a diorama.
³⁷
Often seeing no exit, I thought we were definitively prisoners; but instinct guiding him at the slightest indication, Captain Nemo would discover a new pass. He was never mistaken when he saw the thin threads of bluish water trickling along the ice-fields; and I had no doubt that he had already ventured into the midst of these antarctic seas before. On the 16th of March, however, the ice-fields absolutely blocked our road. It was not the iceberg itself, as yet, but vast fields cemented by the cold. But this obstacle could not stop Captain Nemo: he hurled himself against it with frightful violence. The
Nautilus
entered the brittle mass like a wedge, and split it with frightful crackings. It was the battering-ram of the ancients hurled by infinite strength. The ice, thrown high in the air, fell like hail around us. By its own power of impulsion our apparatus made a canal for itself; sometimes carried away by its own impetus, it lodged on the ice-field, crushing it with its weight, and sometimes buried beneath it, dividing it by a simple pitching movement, producing large rents in it. Violent gales assailed us at this time, accompanied by thick fogs, through which, from one end of the platform to the other, we could see nothing. The wind blew sharply from all points of the compass, and the snow lay in such hard heaps that we had to break it with blows of a pickaxe. The temperature was always at five degrees below zero; every outward part of the
Nautilus
was covered with ice. A rigged vessel could never have worked its way there, for all the rigging would have been entangled in the blocked-up gorges. A vessel without sails, with electricity for its motive-power, and wanting no coal, could alone brave such high latitudes. At length, on the 18th of March, after many useless assaults, the
Nautilus
was positively blocked. It was no longer either streams, packs, or ice-fields, but an interminable and immovable barrier, formed by mountains soldered together.