On February 22 the Nautilus crossed the Sargasso Sea, a quiet part of the Atlantic where seaweed gathers in the middle of the great currents. The weed lay so thick that it looked like a meadow on the water, and the captain kept the Nautilus a few meters under the surface so that it would not tangle his propeller.
After that, for nearly three weeks, we traveled south through the middle of the Atlantic, and nothing happened. I saw little of the captain. My own book on the great depths was full of notes in his hand, which often contradicted my ideas, and sometimes, late at night, I heard the sad music of his organ. Once he took the Nautilus deeper than anyone had ever gone, until its steel plates trembled and the windows of the salon seemed to bend, and he took a photograph of that unknown world. Then the ship shot back up to the surface in four minutes and leaped out of the water like a flying fish.
We did not turn toward Cape Horn and the Pacific, as I had expected, but kept going south. Where was the captain going? To the Pole? That was madness. Ned no longer spoke to me about escape. He was almost silent, and when he met the captain, his eyes burned with anger.
“Poor Ned,” Conseil said to me, “wants everything he cannot have. He is not a scholar like master, and he does not love the wonders of the sea as we do. He would risk everything to sit once more in a tavern in his own country.”
On March 13 we were sitting on the platform on a quiet sea when Ned pointed to the east. A whale was rising and falling with the waves.
“Ah!” he cried. “If I were on a whaler now! Look at that spout! And here I am, tied to these steel plates!”
Soon there were twenty whales, a whole herd. Ned stamped his feet, and his hand trembled as if it held a harpoon.
“Why don’t you ask Captain Nemo if you can hunt them?” said Conseil.
Ned went below at once and came back with the captain.
“Can’t I hunt them, Captain,” asked Ned, “just for old times’ sake?”
“And why? Only to destroy them? We have no use for whale oil on board. Killing for the sake of killing is something I do not allow. These whales are gentle and harmless, Mr. Land, and your hunters are already wiping them out. Leave them alone.”
Ned whistled between his teeth, put his hands in his pockets and turned his back on us. But the captain pointed to some dark moving spots far away.
“Do you see those, Professor? Those are sperm whales. They are cruel and dangerous, nothing but mouth and teeth, and they are coming to attack the whales. We have no pity for them. The Nautilus has a steel spur as good as Mr. Land’s harpoon.”
The Nautilus dived. Ned, Conseil and I took our places at the salon window, and Captain Nemo went to steer the ship himself. The sperm whales had already begun their attack when we arrived.
What a fight it was! The Nautilus was nothing but a huge harpoon in the captain’s hand. It threw itself against the great bodies and passed right through them, leaving two trembling halves behind. After killing one, it rushed at the next, diving when they dived and rising when they rose. For an hour the killing went on. Sometimes ten or twelve sperm whales pressed together on the Nautilus to crush it with their weight, and through the window we saw their huge mouths full of teeth. Ned shouted and swore at them. But the Nautilus carried them away as if they weighed nothing.
At last the survivors fled, and we rose to the surface. The sea was covered with torn bodies. The waves were red for kilometers around, and the Nautilus floated in a sea of blood. Captain Nemo joined us on the platform.
“Well, Mr. Land?”
“Well, Captain,” said Ned, whose excitement had cooled, “it’s a terrible sight. But I’m not a butcher. I’m a hunter, and this is butchery.”
“It was the killing of harmful creatures,” answered the captain, “and the Nautilus is not a butcher’s knife.”
“I prefer my harpoon,” said Ned.
“To each his own,” said the captain, looking hard at him.
I was afraid Ned would do something violent. But at that moment we came up beside a whale that had not escaped the sperm whales’ teeth. It lay dead on its side, and its young one, dead too, floated beside it. Two of the crew climbed onto it and took its milk, and the captain offered me a cup, still warm. I did not want it, but I tasted it and found it as good as cow’s milk.
From that day I noticed, with growing worry, that Ned’s anger toward Captain Nemo was increasing, and I decided to watch him closely.