…”Stern all! Stern all; for your lives!!”
You lean back, pull the oar handles to your chest, dip the ends into the sea, and push with every muscle. Your breathing is quick; your eyes are riveted open; your muscles quiver as the beast behind you thrashes about. Your little boat is now attached to a creature more than 60 feet in length and weighing over 50 tons. You lean, dip, and push even harder.
“For your lives!!” yells the officer again.
You’re facing him as he stands in the stern staring with wide eyed excitement at what you cannot see. The thrashing has stopped, and the officer tells you lift the ends of the oars from the water and quit rowing. The boat is picking up speed as he tosses another loop of rope about the loggerhead. The line runs from its tub, back to and around the loggerhead, and then, tight as a bow-string, over each oar, and out the bow. It moves so fast you cannot see its threads, though you feel them flying past your wrist. You and your mates struggle to bring the oars inboard. Smoke rises from the loggerhead as the rope winds around it.
“Wet the line!” yells the officer.
The seaman with the tub of rope in front of him pulls off his hat and dips water from beside the boat onto the rope as it flies from the tub. You turn to face forward carefully avoiding the rope. To get tangled in it would result in your being pulled overboard and down.
As the speed of the rope diminishes, the boat races faster and faster until your stomach flops from your gut into your throat each time the whaleboat careens up and down an ocean swell…over and over. Spray covers you. The rope…it stretches forward into the sea…pulling you on taking you where it wills. What kind of wondrous power churns at the end of that line!