WHALE HUNTING AT THE NAVY YARD (1887)
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The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
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When the Navy Yard sailors spotted the mass floating in the mill pond-like waters of the Wallabout Bay they could hardly believe their eyes.
Never had anyone before seen a fish of this size enter the Navy Yard’s Whitney Basin, let alone a gargantuan the size of this whale. Old-timers had talked about the ones they’d hunted, going on about their supreme strength and how dangerous a prey they had been to hunt.
Everyone watching braced themselves for the inevitable feats of strength it was preparing to perform.
No noise nor movement, however, emitted from the beast.
This whale’s attitude seemed to be comparable to the peaceful musings of a cat with a ball of yarn.
“It was a big black whale forty feet long,” the papers noted, and it floated listlessly near the entry of the Whitney Basin.
As a great crowd gathered to watch the monstrous fish, it was quickly decided to “man one of the old whale boats to capture the monster.” Many a Starbuck was born that day, as the sailors raced to prepare the rigging and launch their craft.
But something was wrong – something just didn’t seem right with the beast.
It was at that point an old sailor with “a keen olfactory organ caught a whiff of the leviathan’s breath.”
This old salt “expressed the opinion that the fish must have been dead about three years.” Everyone else “who had sailed the Northern seas recognized the odor, as the swell from the naval ferryboat caused the enormous mass to lurch to starboard and strike the sides of the steel cruiser Chicago with a blow that nearly knocked a hole in that vessel.”
A boatswain by the name of Manning declared that the mass was not a whale at all, but a blackfish. Others said that it was a grampus. Commodore Gherardi, however, hit the nail on the head, according to most locals, when he declared what he thought the fish to be:
“A nuisance.”
By his order, a tugboat attached a line to the tail of the fish and hauled it out to sea.
And thereby ran the end of that fish tale…
(Sorry.)
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