The Over-Educated Whale

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 451, 8 December 1904, Page 8

The Over-Educated Whale

The Ancient Mariner's Theory of the Kathleen's Loss. ■ M W Jllllf I— Ml I ■■ T\SAB, dear, that's too bad," murIJ mured the Ancient Mariner, shaking his grizzled head with melancholy concern. "It's a pity, but I always said trouble would come of it. When you go to fooling with nature you can't expect anything else. "What is it? Why, this here case of the whaling bark Kathleen that was rammed and sunk by a sperm whale, leaving the crew and the skipper's wife and the skipper's wife's parrot adrift in open boats with no tobacco e, thousand "miles east of Barbados. kind of personal responsibility for "that there calamity; though Lord knows it wa'n*t my fault, for I dons nil I could to prevent it. "Why do you suppose that there whale went for that there ship? The mate says ft was reveng«, because he seen his wife killed. "Bats! There ain't but very little sentiment about a bull sperm whale. He don't respond none am a rule to the tender emotions. He don't go in for chivalry Hka us—his motives is strictly practical. "The whale rammed that ship because that was what he had been trained to do. He wasn't no wild whale —he was my long lost pet Little Willie. "I bet if I'd been there and whistled to him he'd have swum up to me smilin' and wagged his tail. Did you ever see e whale smile? Well, just go to the zoo and look at the hippopotamus through the biggest pair of op'ry glaases you can find, and you can get some idea of the effect. - "How do I know he was Little Willie ? How do you know a cyclone struck a town when yon ain't seen it? By the - results, don't you? well, I don't need no more to identify my pet. *** Of course there's a little discrepancies. The mate says the whale that struck the Kathleen was 110 feet long. Little Willie was 110 feet one inch fc and three-quarters. But that ain't no fatal difference. "You don't realize unless you've seen a sperm whale in action how hard it is to take his measure within an inch or two under them circumstances. I've known men to miss it by as much as six inches—old hands at the business, too. "With" sea serpents it's worse yet. Once I heard a lookout report a sea serpent 450 feet long; and when we got him aboard we packed him into a mess aork barrel, with room enough left for a mermaid. ■: "The discrepancy about the weight looks worse at first sight than the one About the length, but there really ain't nothin' in it. The mate says the Kathleens' whale weighed 100 tons. Little Willie weighed 103 tons 979 pounds 11 ounces and three-eiprhths the last-time I saw him, but you know yourself hV>w even people will lose flesh on poor board. "* i As long as Willie stayed with us we always saw that he got plenty to eat, but after he left us he had to hustle . for himself. I don't count that little loss of three tons or so as any evidence against identification at all. j "Treinin* whales was Jim Kearney's {ad. There never was a greater genius than what Jim Kearney was, but he was reckless and sort of unbalanced. {He got the notion that trained whale* •was to be the great naval feature of I the com in' century. It made him eloquent to talk about it. | £ The battle fleets of the future,' he Would say, 'is cruisin' by fluke power 'through the tropic seas. They need no coalin' stations, no dry docks, no reserves of men and ammunition. Nature is keepin' them up in inexhaustJbje numbers for the nation that first has wit enough to use them, and that nation will have the mastery of the •*«■' was so possessed with this notion that he determined to begin trying experiments himself. He had a bit of a reef in the Bahamas that nobody erer visited, and he persuaded me to go down there and help him, ,• "I tried to get him to give the thing np, but you might as well try to flag a Vanderbilfc automobile with a red was just set, and there {wasn't anything for it but to let him fcave hi* own way.-

"Kearney has!, a schooner, the L:. >.fine, that used to be a pilot boat, ai--. voxild sail in any kind of weather that i flyin' fish would lire We cruised trouml in the northwest trades f<>r lu'hite luokih' for.-; ermcalf, for Kear-ii-v said that to get the best resul'!i'rom education you must catch 'em "ling. "1 won't bore you tellin'about thai cruise, though it would make a mighty good story itself, but at last we caught our calf and h'isted him into a Jan!; on deck. Kearney named him Liil! Wilile, after a kid of his own. Then we put for the reef, which had a sinoot!: lagoon inside of it. and was altogether as well cut out for a whale academy ;is any place you could find in the geography; "Kearney's idee was to use. hiwhales mostly for rams, though sonic limes for torpedo boats. So he had .- hn mess fitted over Little Willie's head with a steel spur in front, and I; strained him to go full tilt at an oh. Hulk that was moored for a target. "How did he make him do it? Why. every time little Willie would hit th( hulk fair and square. Kearney wouh 7 give him a lump of sugar. You don't mean to say you didn't know thai whales liked sugar. Next, time you meet one, you just offer him a lump and see what he does. "Well, as things went on the experiment seemed to be a success. Little Willie absorbed education aa if hisfather had been a college president. He vgould lie pointing at the target with his flukes a-quiverin' like a cat's tail when she's watching for a mouse, and then when Kearnej- would give the signal by proddin' him with a harpoon he would shoot forward like a bullet and hit that hulk a swipe that' would rattle it like a dynamite blast. Then he would swim back, happy and proud, for his sugar, with a smile on his face that would take in a four-horse truck. "Sometimes Kearney would rig him up with a spar torpedo, and he was trained to stop at them times and back away as soon as the spar touched the target. • "Well. I was worried all the time, for I didn't know where all this was goin' |to end. Little Willie kept growin' bigger and bigger, and we had to keep fittin' him with new ram bows in place J of those he'd outgrown and gettin' | more hulks to take the places of thopp ihe was smashing into kindlin'. It looked to me as if there was trouble ahead, and sure enough there was. "One day Kearney was in a bad humor and absent-flninded. When he started out for target practice he jabbed Little Willie with the harpoon before he got- him headed in the right direction. Off he shot, as he'd been taught. "Kearney tried to call him back, but you know yourself it wasn't reasonable to expect he'd hear it. In another minute Little Willie had smashed clean through the side of the Lady Mine, and then he came back, innocent and self-satisfied, for his sugar. «, "Well, you never saw a man so crazy with rage as what Kearney was. Although the thing was entirely his own |fault, he laid it all to that poor, inoffensive beast, and when Little Willie swum up, expectin' to be praised and rewarded, as he had a perfect right to, Kearney yelled: Hset away, you lubber!' and give him a kick* "Well, you know Little Willie never had such an insult before, and >it knocked him all in a heap. He looked at us reproachful for a minute, and then he turned around on his tail, dignified and deliberate, and put to sea. We never seen him again. .-_ "Now you see what happened to the. Kathleen, don't you? The whale was a layin' head on the ship when they trim the harpoon into him. He took that for the signal, and without stoppin' to think he carried out his trainin'. "And I'm bettin' that if those men hadn't been too flustered to look, they'd have seen that there whale had on a ram bow."—N. Y. Sun. EXPENSIVE RABBITS. ** rho Comtly Game Preserve of a Fa. muai French Writer, and a . Neighbor'* Triok. --H An amusing story is told by the Courrier des Etate-Unis concerning Guj- de Maupassant, who once maintained near his home, a rabbit-warren of a few acres in the midst of cultivated iields. The enterprise wu a source of plentiful income to the Normandy peasants, who took the opportunity lo plant choice vegetables in the adjoining fields. Then they demanded large compensation for the alleged damage done by their neighbor's rahoits. Every year De Maupassant had ;>< pay heavily, and the peasants began to feel that a rabbit-warren was an excellent neighbor. After a few years, however, the own»r of the warren began to grow tired of the arrangement. He reckoned that under the existing state of things the few rabbits he shot cost him about >2O each, which waa rather.too much, even for an enthusiastic sportsman. So he determined to destroy the game pre.siTve. It was not much trouble.- There were only four or five burrows in the •nclosnre, and a few ferrets soon killed ail the occupants.© One night, after ail the rabbits had ! >een destroyed, the owner happened to visit his former preserve, and detected a man skulking along under the trees, with a large bag on his back. De Maupassant at once to the '■f-nclusion that the man had come to -teal wood. When he challenged him, .he supposed thief took to his heels. 'earing the back behindj im. It was 'mind to be filled with rab'.its of both .-exes. Tr.e man was no thief, but a neighbor ••' the writer, who. shrewdly r< • mbc t ! inr there c?Mil?l be n- »• • '*:■ :c* if there v.-r-re n:> ?•••'-' '■■• '- ■■- ':<. it -•> i: ; ' ':■• to .-■:.' w