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The local situation of Port Jackson gives them an advantage over the English and the American merchants, since the distance of both these from the field of their gains, must necessarily impede them greatly; whereas the ships that leave Sydney on a whaling excursion, arrive without loss of time upon their ground, and return either for fresh supplies or to repair damages with equal facility.
At length the ships are completely surrounded, and anchored to the snowy floes which extend in all directions. By the end of July they have managed to press on out of the track of all the whaling vessels, and make for Lancaster Sound, westward. The desolate coast of North Devon is skirted, and subsequently Beachey Island is reached.
'I've been whaling mysel', said he; 'and I've heerd tell as whalers wear knives, and I'd ha' gi'en t' gang a taste o' my whittle, if I'd been cotched up just as I'd set my foot a-shore. 'I don't know, said Philip; 'we're at war wi' the French, and we shouldn't like to be beaten; and yet if our numbers are not equal to theirs, we stand a strong chance of it.
Cape May and Tuckerton were started and maintained by whaling; and as late as 1830, it is said, there were still signs of the industry on Long Beach. Except for the whaling, the beaches were uninhabited wild stretches of sand, swarming with birds and wild fowl, without a lighthouse or lifesaving station.
At present the only protection is the exhaustion of a whaling ground below a paying yield; when whaling stops till the whales breed back. But soon they won't breed back at all. Modern steam whaling spares no kind of whale in any kind of sea. It has one good point. It is more humane, as a rule. But the odds against the whale are simply annihilating.
But my friend in mufti was spotted at once; for he marched up to the middle of the bar, looked right and left and snapped out his order; but before he opened his mouth the whaling men were shouldering into little tongue-tied groups the quarter deck air came in like a draught and took them all slightly aback, and we got never a bit of information.
But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed, and taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale.
The rest of the company on the Dipsey took no very great interest in the whaling cruise, but, on consultation with Mr. Clewe and Mrs. Raleigh at Sardis, it was decided that they ought by no means to leave the polar sea until they had explored it as thoroughly as circumstances would allow.
These stories so fired the young gentleman's imagination that he resolved to try his fortune at a whaling voyage as soon as the people of Hudson sent their first ship out. There was the wide world before him, and perhaps he might find the means of making a fortune in some distant land. But how was he to break this resolution to his kind parents, whom he loved so dearly?
The enterprising people of Hudson shared the whale-fishery business with New Bedford and Nantucket; their fleet of ships were fitted out in the very best manner, and some of the most famous whaling captains sailed from that port. A bright light burned in Chapman's parlor that night, and the ponderous Mrs. Chapman sat nursing her dignity in a great new rocking-chair.
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