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ship. There were many of them and I hoped they would cause a mutiny and put me ashore, but the very next day, the ship killed four more sperm whales, who the young mate said were a thousand miles from their usual haunts.
    "Proves I was right," he bragged, and furthermore we'll take an Indian to Boston and show the citizens of that proper town what real Indians look like. No feathered savages, these ones."
    He gave me an admiring smile. The smile and what he had said about taking us away and showing us off to strange people made me more determined than I ever was to flee from the ship.
    He drank down the last of a flagon of wine he had bought nearby at Mission Ventura and went reeling on deck. I had cleaned up the table and was getting ready to wash the dishes with the help of a dwarf South Sea Islander they had picked up somewhere—and were also going to take to Boston—when I heard a scream, then the running of feet and the shouts of many men.

    The commotion was caused by a strange accident that had befallen the earringed mate, whether from the wine he had drunk at the noon meal or from an odd misfortune, I do not know.
    I had never seen a sperm whale before. The whales that live on our coast are different. They have a more fishlike look about them for one thing. But the sperm whale has a prow for a nose, like a great rock that rises straight from the sea. It forms a fourth part of the animal. The cook had told me this the first day when he had set me to peeling the basket of potatoes.
    When Mando and I had first set foot on the ship, I had noticed an enormous head hanging at the bulwarks, held there by iron hooks fastened to ropes strung from above.
    While I was peeling the basket of potatoes the cook had set before me, I asked him about this enormous head, which had loomed beside me when I had climbed on deck. I remembered the fright I had felt at this great dangling maw with its ivory teeth that looked as long as my arm. Beyond it hung still another of these giant heads, its mouth gaping open.
    "Pure ivory," said the cook. "Valuable, but it's the head that's the treasure. Full of spermaceti, it is. Enough to fill five casks. It makes the finest perfume, young lady, this sweet-smelling whale oil."

    "I have none," I said.
    "If you did, here's where it would come from."
    I ran out of the galley at the sound of screams and running feet. The cook followed me. Men were clustered around one of these hanging whale heads, some with knives, others with spades. They were all talking at once.
    Mando grabbed my arm. "It's the mate. The one with the gold earring," he said. "He has fallen and will drown."
    The mate, it seemed, had insisted upon cutting into the heads. This was his task, one that no one else could do so well. Not only to cut into the animal at the proper place but to manage the bailing out of the precious liquid it held in its enormous head.
    After the iron bucket had gone down more than a dozen times, like a bucket into a well, and come back filled, the mate somehow had slipped and fallen deep down into the whale's skull, which was like a deep cavern.
    His screams came up from the cavern, growing louder and louder while the men stood by, planning how best to reach him. First the iron bucket was taken from the pole and the pole lowered into the well. But, for some reason, the mate did not grasp it.

    His screams grew fainter. Then someone with a flensing knife hacked at the underside of the whale's skull. The precious liquid poured out and with it the mate. He fell into the sea, drifted face downward, and before anyone could reach him sank from view. A few oily bubbles marked the place where he had gone down. Then the hat he had worn bobbed up and the sea was quiet.
    All the ship's longboats, including ours, were manned. They went around in circles over the place where the mate had disappeared, but all they found was the hat he had worn, glistening with the precious oil that covered the sea.

Chapter 9
    I T WAS the