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Whaling, like some human fungus, seemed to thrive in the pall-like depth of the social darkness and depression. She circled from house to house, and swooped down upon the inmates, flapping and croaking the old story of woe and foreboding; or, what was welcome in comparison, some new tale of further entanglement for Ray.
He was pointing out something to the little boy, in the distance, so that I stared also and caught a puff of vapor above the water. "It's a whale, isn't it?" I asked. "Yis, ma'am," replied Sammy. "It's one o' they big sulphur-bottoms. Them little whaling steamers is mighty glad to get hold o' that kind. They grows awful big. I've seed some shockin' big fellows." "I'd like to see one caught.
In January, 1836, Captain Smith, who was in charge of the whaling station at Port Fairy, went with two men, named Wilson and Gibbs, in a whale boat to the islands near Warrnambool, to look for seal. They could find no seal, and then they went across the bay, and found the mouth of the river Hopkins. In trying to land there, their boat capsized in the surf, and Smith was drowned.
"From the North Pacific," answered the voice; and we dimly discerned its owner groping his way forward. "From the five years' whaling voyage into which I was gagged and dragged shanghaied, they call it. O, Pen, I didn't dare to hope I should find " "Oh, Chauncey, is it you?" she cried, and fell fainting at his feet.
The Minerva, Captain Perry, of New Bedford, has abandoned the whaling business, and is now on his way hence to Valparaiso for a cargo of merchandise. Although two large ships, four barks, and eight or ten brigs and schooners have arrived here since my return from the mineral country, about four weeks since, with large cargoes of merchandise, their entire invoices have been sold.
As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me.
The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say. THE WHALE NO FAMOUS AUTHOR, AND WHALING NO FAMOUS CHRONICLER? Who wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed the first narrative of a whaling-voyage?
The whale-fishing opens about the first week in August, and continues throughout September. As it drew near, the settlement prepared to move farther north, to a locality where they claimed whales could be found in abundance. I cheerfully assisted in the preparations, for to meet some whaling vessel was my only hope of rescue from surroundings that made existence a living death.
We had forgathered aboard Captain Thom's ship on the Monday night with several whaling captains who were bringing up their sons to their own profession. They were "old stagers" with faces lined and seamed by the storms of half a century, and they were even more interested in the story of our voyage from Elephant Island than the younger generation was.
In the spring two boats were constructed in which the company started southward along the coast, where they were finally picked up by a whaling vessel. The conquest of the northeast passage was not achieved until the latter part of the century. In 1878 Baron Nordenskjold, a Swedish explorer commanding the Vega, entered the Arctic and sailed eastward along the Russian and Siberian coast.
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