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It was hard upon March when I began work in earnest; the weather was cold; still, there were plenty of inspectors to back me with advice. When a whaling-captain hove in sight I just rested on my adz awhile and "gammed" with him. New Bedford, the home of whaling-captains, is connected with Fairhaven by a bridge, and the walking is good. They never "worked along up" to the shipyard too often for me.
I should have let him go again, but he beat himself to death before we could get out the hook, and I amused myself by preparing and mounting the skin. That paper-knife has a sad history. I had it made in London. The blade is cut from a walrus's tooth given to me by a whaling-captain at Hawaii, and I bought the coral which forms the handle from a diver whom I saw bring it up on the Corsican coast.
Wilson's life was, indeed, a marvel of cheerful laboriousness; exhibiting the power of the soul to triumph over the body, and almost to set it at defiance. It might be taken as an illustration of the saying of the whaling-captain to Dr. Kane, as to the power of moral force over physical: "Bless you, sir, the soul will any day lift the body out of its boots!"
In 1831 a whaling-captain deserted the daughter of a chief in the neighbourhood in order to take to himself another chief's daughter, also of a tribe by the Bay. The tribe of the deserted woman attacked that of the favoured damsel. A village was burnt, a benevolent mediator shot, and a hundred lives lost.
It might be taken as an illustration of the saying of the whaling-captain to Dr. Kane, as to the power of moral force over physical: "Bless you, sir, the soul will any day lift the body out of its boots!" A fragile but bright and lively boy, he had scarcely entered manhood ere his constitution began to exhibit signs of disease.
One midwinter day of 1892, in Boston, where I had been cast up from old ocean, so to speak, a year or two before, I was cogitating whether I should apply for a command, and again eat my bread and butter on the sea, or go to work at the shipyard, when I met an old acquaintance, a whaling-captain, who said: "Come to Fairhaven and I'll give you a ship. But," he added, "she wants some repairs."
I was better pleased with a rough old whaling-captain who gave directions for a broad marble slab divided into two compartments, one of which was to contain an epitaph on his deceased wife and the other to be left vacant till death should engrave his own name there.
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