The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne;Sidney Kravitz (translator)

Author:Jules Verne;Sidney Kravitz (translator)
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-07-30T23:21:20+00:00

“What a monster,” cried Neb.

And the expression was justified because this was a southern whale, eighty feet long, a giant of its species, which would not weigh less than one hundred fifty thousand pounds.

However, the stranded monster did not move nor did it struggle to get back to the sea while it was still high tide.

The colonists soon had the explanation for its immobility when, at low tide, they were able to go around the animal.

It was dead, with a harpoon sticking into its left side.

“Are there whalers in our waters,” Gideon Spilett said immediately.

“Why do you say that?” asked the sailor.

“Since this harpoon is still there...”

“Ah! Mister Spilett, that proves nothing,” replied Pencroff. “Whales can travel thousands of miles with a harpoon in their sides, and this one could have been struck in the North Atlantic and come to die in the South Pacific, that would not be astonishing!”

“However...,” said Gideon Spilett, not satisfied with Pencroff’s statement.

“That is perfectly possible,” replied Cyrus Smith, “but let us examine this harpoon. Perhaps, as is customary, the whalers have engraved the name of their vessel on it.”

Pencroff pulled out the harpoon from the animal’s side and read this inscription on it:

Maria-Stella Vineyard.

“A vessel from the Vineyard! A vessel from my country!” he cried. “The Maria-Stella! A fine whaler, believe me! I know that ship! Ah! My friends, a vessel from the Vineyard, a whaler from the Vineyard.”1

And the sailor, swinging the harpoon, repeated not without emotion, this name which had touched his heart, this name from his native land.

But since they could not wait for the Maria-Stella to come and reclaim the animal harpooned by it, they resolved to proceed to cut it up before it became decomposed. The birds of prey, who had watched this rich prey for several days, wanted to take possession of it without further delay, and they had to scare them away with gunshots.

This whale was a female whose breasts would furnish a large quantity of milk which, in the opinion of the naturalist Dieffenbach, can pass as cow’s milk, since it differs from it neither in taste, nor color, nor density.

Pencroff had formerly served on a whaling vessel and he was able to supervise the cutting operation—a rather unpleasant operation which lasted three days, but which none of the colonists avoided, not even Gideon Spilett whom, as the sailor said, would end by becoming “a very good castaway.”

The blubber, cut into parallel slices two and a half feet thick, then divided into pieces weighing a thousand pounds each, were melted in large earthen vases carried to the very spot—because they did not want to smell up the approaches to Grand View Plateau—and in this fusion it lost about a third of its weight. But there were lavish quantities: The tongue alone gave six thousand pounds of oil and the lower lip four thousand. Then, with this blubber, which would provide stearin and glycerin for a long time, they still had the whalebones which would doubtless find some application even though no umbrellas nor corsets were used at Granite House.

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