At Gisborne we lay some three or four days, discharging and reloading. Then, homeward-bound, and once more with a well-piled deck, the Tikirau went out again, to trade up the coast instead of down. Places, like people, are extremely different according to the way in which you approach them; and although we steered practically the same course, and called at pretty nearly all the same ports, our passage up, nevertheless, stands out clear in my memory as quite a different trip from our passage down. We had still, however, the same brilliant weather—I remember scarcely one grey day, although plenty of rough ones—it was still an epic of brightness, a long delightful tale of “blue days at sea.”
Once we dipped our ensign, run up for the occasion, to a man-o’-war, whose trim hull and yellow funnels were dodging in and out among our remote haunts, taking soundings, we supposed; she looked like Behemoth in comparison with our insignificance. Once we sighted a whale, once we caught a young shark, and several times we had a porpoise hunt. These were quite exciting. One of the men, armed with a harpoon, would take his stand in the chains ready to strike at any polished back as it rose or rolled beneath him; another man stood by with a bowline to be slipped instantly over the tail of the “catch” by way of support, while Floss and Darkie, rigid with excitement, paws upon the rail, hindfeet on the deck, rapturously barked and squealed. Once a porpoise did get “fixed”; but the bowline was not ready at the moment, and the poor victim, breaking away from the harpoon, ripped a great square out of his back, and left a
