Our third whale was the cause of an incident which greatly amused everybody on board. We were in about latitude 12° N., longitude 60° E., nearly in the track of steamers to Bombay from the east coast of Africa. Our try-works was going full blast, sending up a huge column of black and oily smoke, which rose to a great height in the still air. It was very hot and quite calm, and the men, clad in nothing but shirts and old trousers—many of them had dispensed with the shirt—were sweating, cursing, and grumbling at the foul, sticky smoke, which choked them and made them look like coal-heavers or worse. Suddenly there was a cry of “Sail ho!” All, without stopping their work, followed the direction of the lookout, and gazed off to the southward. Pretty soon the smoke of a steamer appeared; then her stack, and then her upper works rose out of the sea. She was heading straight for us, and the belching smoke from her stack showed that she was crowding her furnaces. She continued to come on, straight for us, until she was perhaps four miles away, and we could see that she was no tramp, but a regular passenger steamer which ran to Bombay and ports farther east. At that distance she could see us clearly, without the possibility of making a mistake as to our character. She seemed to be seized with sudden disgust, made as quick a turn as she could, and stood off on her course to the northeast. Many of the crew guffawed. “Thought we were afire,” {244} one man said, “and found that we were nothing but a damned whaler. Could n’t be any worse,” he added, “if we were afire. That ’s the way I feel now.” Peter was sorry. “Too bad that she made that mistake,” he said to me later. “Whalers do get afire sometimes, Timmie, and the smoke would n’t be very different. Other ships, too, as I know well, though the smoke of it ’s apt to be different. When her officers see a good deal of smoke again, they ’ll probably say it ’s only another damned whaler, and hold their course. There was a ship I sailed in once, carrying grain. It got afire somehow and smouldered for weeks.” He seemed to have finished. I was impatient. “What did you do, Peter?” “Do, lad?” he asked, with his quiet smile. “We did n’t do anything but batten down the hatches tighter ’n ever, and try to smother it. We made our port, but the decks were too hot to stand on with comfort.” “Why did n’t you put any water on the fire? That would have put it out, would n’t it?” He smiled again. “Aye, I s’pose it would. But wet down grain? ’T would have split her wide open.” We left the Arabian Sea with seven hundred and fifty barrels of oil in our hold, and stood to the eastward, as far as the Maldive Islands. Fifteen months out, and seven hundred and fifty barrels, and it would take nearly twenty-four hundred barrels to fill us up. If we did no better than that, on the average, it meant three years more of it before we could be sailing into Buzzards Bay, a full ship. But I did not know that I cared greatly.