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Updated: May 3, 2025
Sometimes, when I sit in the chimney-corner of a winter evening, smoking my pipe with my old messmate Tom Lokins, I stare into the fire and think of the days gone by till I forget where I am, and go on thinking so hard that the flames seem to turn into melting fires, and the bars of the grate into dead fish, and the smoke into sails and rigging, and I go to work cutting up the blubber and stirring the oil-pots, or pulling the bow-oar and driving the harpoon at such a rate that I can't help giving a shout, which causes Tom to start and cry: "Hallo!
It was not till the night was far spent, and the silver moon was sailing through the starry sky, that the Yankees left us, and rowed away with a parting cheer. Six months after our "gam" with the Yankees Tom Lokins and I found ourselves seated once more in the little garret beside my dear old mother. "Deary me, Robert, how changed ye are!" "Changed, Mother! I should think so!
"Blowed up with gunpowder, and shattered to a thousand pieces," said Tom Lokins, raising his voice with excitement, as he read from his paper an account of the blowing up of a mountain fortress in India. "Oh! come, I say, one at a time, if you please," cried a harpooner; "a feller can't git a word of sense out of sich a jumble."
When all was ready, the captain and the two mates with Tom Lokins got upon the whale's body, with long-handled sharp spades or digging-knives. With these they fell to work cutting off the blubber. I was stationed at one of the hoisting ropes, and while we were waiting for the signal to "hoist away", I peeped over the side, and for the first time had a good look at the great fish.
The man in the "crow's-nest", as they call the cask fixed up at the masthead, was looking anxiously out for whales, and the crew were idling about the deck. Tom Lokins was seated on the windlass smoking his pipe, and I was sitting beside him on an empty cask, sharpening a blubber-knife. "Tom," said I, "what like is a whale?" "Why, it's like nothin' but itself," replied Tom, looking puzzled.
It was on a fine calm morning, just after breakfast, that we fell in with this ship. We had seen no whales for a day or two, but we did not mind that, for our hold was almost full of oil-barrels. Tom Lokins and I were leaning over the starboard bulwarks, watching the small fish that every now and then darted through the clear-blue water like arrows, and smoking our pipes in silence.
Tom Lokins, however, had noticed what I was about; he seized me by the collar of my jacket just as I reached the water, and held me with a grip like a vice till one of the men came to his assistance, and dragged me back into the boat. In a few moments more we reached the hen-coop, and Fred was saved!
My first few days on the ocean were so miserable that I oftentimes repented of having left my native land. I was, as my new friend Tom Lokins said, as sick as a dog. But in course of time I grew well, and began to rejoice in the cool fresh breezes and the great rolling billows of the sea.
We at last got within a few feet of the monster, and the captain suddenly gave the word, "Stand up." This was to our harpooner, Tom Lokins, who jumped up on the instant, and buried two harpoons deep in the blubber. "Stern all!" was the next word, and we backed off with all our might.
But I am not sure that that's the reason either, because, you know, we often sail through them without seeing the light, though of course they must be there." "P'raps, sir," said Tom Lokins; "p'raps, sir, they're sleepy sometimes, an' can't be bothered gettin' angry." "Perhaps!" answered the captain, laughing.
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