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knife nor with your tongue."
    "I will speak to Mukat," Mando said.
    "Speak to Mukat all you wish. But to the white men say nothing."
    We rounded the headland and set off in the direction of the whaling ship. It was still billowing smoke. Through the smoke I could see fires burning and men moving about on the deck and on the carcasses of the two dead whales. It looked like the scene Father Vicente described to us sometimes—like the smoke and fires of Hell.
    When we reached the ship the blue-eyed man told us to climb a rope ladder that was dangling over the ship. "Step lively," he said, which we did, though the ladder swayed and the ship rolled. He came up after us and took me to a place in the bow where food was cooking on a brick stove. I was not there a second before the cook thrust a knife into my hand and pointed out a basket of potatoes. He said nothing but made motions, which meant that I was to peel them.

    I did not know what happened to Mando until noon when the men came in to eat. He was as oily and black as the rest and when he spoke his teeth glistened white against his skin.
    "What do you do?" I whispered to him.
    "I toss hunks of blubber into the pots," he whispered back. "The heat and the smoke are bad. And the smell, it does something to the stomach. Tomorrow I will go crazy and jump overboard. Maybe I will go crazy before tomorrow."

Chapter 8
    T HE COOK was fat and enjoyed eating. He enjoyed chewing tobacco, too, which he carried in a leather pouch. He enjoyed both so much that he chewed and ate at the same time, holding the tobacco under his lower lip while he munched away. He spat a lot, sometimes in the fire. But the next morning when I helped him slice up the beef the mate had bought on shore he told me to take my time and not get in a hurry.

    "This is no boarding house where they have to eat on the stroke of the hour," he said. "Here we serve mess when it's ready. Not a minute before."
    In the afternoon he gave me some time and urged me to look around the ship.
    "The Boston Boy is not a very pretty sight right now," he said. "But you can hold your nose and look where you want. If the men give you any lip, give it back to them. But mostly they're gentlemen—the rough sort, mind you. Besides, they've got no time for chatter."

    He walked to the door of the galley, which ran from one side of the ship to the other, spat to windward, and came back.
    "We ran into some sperm whales," he said. "What they're doing around here—usually it's the grays—nobody knows. But we caught us two and since we're on shares everybody is killing himself to fill every barrel on shipboard."
    I was not interested in watching the men slice off the blubber in great long strips with their sharp flensing knives and haul the whales aboard with big hooks and fling them into the trying pots. I wanted to talk to my brother Mando and see if together we could think of some way to get away from the ship.
    Most of the ship—all of the middle part—was given up to boiling the blubber. In front of one of the brick furnaces I found Mando. He was stripped to the waist and was feeding the fire under the pots. He had a pair of tongs and would reach in the pot and pull out pieces that no longer had oil in them and then fling them into the fire, where they blazed up and added mightily to the heat.
    He glanced at me but there was no chance to talk. I tried to meet him that night after supper but I could not find him. It was not until the third day, in the afternoon, that an accident happened to the mate, the young man with the wrinkles and the gold earring, that gave us a chance to talk.

    The mate had talked a lot at noon when he was eating, bragging about how rich everyone was going to be, now that a girl was aboard.
    "Nothing but luck," he had said, "from now until the time we sight Boston port. Fair seas at the Cape, following winds, good weather."
    He was talking to all the sailors who thought that it was bad luck to have a woman on the