The idea of the series of leaps is to rid himself of
the hook, and the man who has
Made the strike must be of iron or
decadent if his heart does not beat with an extra flutter when he
beholds such gorgeous fish, glittering in golden mail and shaking
itself like a stallion in each mid-air leap. 'Ware slack! If you
don't, on one of those leaps the hook will be flung out and twenty
feet away. No slack, and away he will go on another run,
culminating in another series of leaps. About this time one begins
to worry over the line, and to wish that he had had nine hundred
feet on the reel originally instead of six hundred. With careful
playing the line can be saved, and after an hour of keen excitement
the fish can be brought to gaff. One such dolphin I landed on the
Snark measured four feet and seven inches.
Hermann caught dolphins more prosaically. A hand-line and a chunk
of shark-meat were all he needed. His hand-line was very thick, but
on more than one occasion it parted and lost the fish. One day a
dolphin got away with a lure of Hermann's manufacture, to which were
lashed four O'Shaughnessy hooks. Within an hour the same dolphin
was landed with the rod, and on dissecting him the four hooks were
recovered. The dolphins, which remained with us over a month,
deserted us north of the line, and not one was seen during the
remainder of the traverse.
So the days passed. There was so much to be done that time never
dragged. Had there been little to do, time could not have dragged
with such wonderful seascapes and cloudscapes - dawns that were like
burning imperial cities under rainbows that arched nearly to the
zenith; sunsets that bathed the purple sea in rivers of rose-
coloured light, flowing from a sun whose diverging, heaven-climbing
rays were of the purest blue. Overside, in the heat of the day, the
sea was an azure satiny fabric, in the depths of which the sunshine
focussed in funnels of light. Astern, deep down, when there was a
breeze, bubbled a procession of milky-turquoise ghosts - the foam
flung down by the hull of the Snark each time she floundered against
a sea. At night the wake was phosphorescent fire, where the medusa
slime resented our passing bulk, while far down could be observed
the unceasing flight of comets, with long, undulating, nebulous
tails - caused by the passage of the bonitas through the resentful
medusa slime. And now and again, from out of the darkness on either
hand, just under the surface, larger phosphorescent organisms
flashed up like electric lights, marking collisions with the
careless bonitas skurrying ahead to the good hunting just beyond our
bowsprit.
We made our easting, worked down through the doldrums, and caught a
fresh breeze out of south-by-west. Hauled up by the wind, on such a
slant, we would fetch past the Marquesas far away to the westward.
But the next day, on Tuesday, November 26, in the thick of a heavy
squall, the wind shifted suddenly to the southeast.
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