The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth by Thomas Morris

Author:Thomas Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

Edward T. Hinckley, of Wareham, Mass., then mate of the bark Andrews, commanded by James L. Nye, of Sandwich, Mass., sailed some two years and a half since (we find the date omitted in our minutes) from New Bedford, Mass., on a whaling voyage.

New Bedford was probably the busiest whaling port in the world at the time, with eighty-seven ships setting off on expeditions in 1850 alone. One of them, the Ann Alexander, would become famous the following year when she was rammed and sunk by a sperm whale—a real-life Moby Dick!* Very few ships are known to have been sunk by whales, but on its voyage, the Andrews—which weighed anchor just two days after the Ann Alexander—would also have an unfortunate encounter with one. During an eventful voyage, it was the crew, however, who provided the early excitement:

When off the Galapagos Islands, one of the hands, who had shown a mutinous disposition, attacked Captain Nye with some violence, in consequence of a reproof given him for disobedience. In the scuffle which ensued, a wound was inflicted with a knife, commencing at the angle of the jaw, and dividing the skin and superficial tissues of the left side of the neck, down to the middle of the clavicle, under which the point of the knife went.

An ugly-sounding wound. The knife opened up a gash down the side of the captain’s neck, from the hinge of his jaw to the collarbone.

It was done in broad day, in presence of the greater part of the crew; and Mr. Hinckley, the mate, being so near that he was at that moment rushing to the captain’s assistance. Instantly seizing the villain, and handing him over to the crew, the knife either fell or was drawn by someone present, and a frightful gush of dark blood welled up from the wound, as the captain fell upon the deck.

The “dark blood” was a sign that a vein, rather than an artery, had been injured—still serious, but less immediately life-threatening.

Mr. Hinckley immediately thrust his fingers into the wound, and endeavored to catch the bleeding vessel; with the thumb against the clavicle, as a point of action, and gripping, as he expressed it to me, “all between,” he found the bleeding nearly cease. Such had been the violence of the haemorrhage, a space on the deck fully as large as a barrel head being covered with blood in a few seconds, that it was evident from that and the consequent faintness that the captain would instantly die, should he remove his fingers from the bleeding vessel.

An alarming position to be in. His finger was now holding back a crimson tide, like a bloodier version of the little Dutch boy and the dyke. He paused for a moment to work out what to do.

The bleeding had stopped for now, but he needed to find a way of removing his digits without the hemorrhage recurring:

“I found my fingers passed under something running in the same course with the bone; this I slowly endeavored to draw up out of the wound, so as to see if it was not the blood vessel.

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