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Updated: May 19, 2025
The delay in breaking the seal was due entirely to the fact that a coil of light cordage, used aboard the yachts he was accustomed to fit out, had just been reported as missing, and so the unopened letter was tossed on top a barrel of sperm-oil to await his convenience.
Hear me, then: I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign of good luck; for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be chock a' block with sperm-oil, d'ye see; and so, all that sperm will work up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will yet be as three spermaceti candles that's the good promise we saw."
Provide small lamps with handles for carrying about, and broad-bottomed lamps for the kitchen, as these are not easily upset. Hand and kitchen lamps are best made of metal, unless they are to be used by very careful persons. Sperm-oil, lard, tallow, etc., have been superseded to such an extent by kerosene that it is scarcely worth while to give any special directions in regard to them.
Still remaining in the bottom of his bag might have been found two small rubber bags filled with nitroglycerine, a cake of yellow soap, a brace and bit, a half-dozen diamond-pointed drills, a box of timers, and a coil fuse, three tempered-steel chisels, a tiny sperm-oil lantern and the steel "jimmy" which had already been tested against the obdurate transom.
If he could have got hold of the Wonderful Lamp, I knew he would have trimmed it and lighted it, and delivered a lecture over it on the qualities of sperm-oil, with a glance at the whale fisheries.
Hear me, then; I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign of good luck; for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be chock a' block with sperm-oil, d'ye see; and so, all that sperm will work up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will yet be as three spermaceti candles that's the good promise we saw."
It is poor economy to use a bad light. Modern houses in cities, and even in large villages, are furnished with gas; where gas is not used, sperm-oil, kerosene or coal-oil, and candles are employed. Good sperm-oil burned in an Argand lamp that is, a lamp with a circular wick, like the astral lamp and others is perhaps the best; but it is expensive and attended with many inconveniences.
In the unbroken and absolute silence which seemed to mock at his foolish and stampeding fears, an immediate reaction of spirit set it. He felt almost glad for this material target against which to fling his terrors, for this precipitation of apprehension into something tangible. He groped through his bag, hurriedly yet cautiously, for his little sperm-oil lantern.
The Catamaran herself was not "cut loose" in the nautical sense of the term, and abandoned, but she was cut loose in a literal sense, and in pieces hoisted aboard the ship to be employed for various purposes, her ropes, spars, and sail to be used at some time as they had been originally intended her other timbers to go to the stock of the carpenter, and her casks to the cooper, to be eventually filled with the precious sperm-oil which the ship's crew were engaged in trying out.
One fine afternoon I was sitting on the main-hatch, overhauling the clock-work of the taffrail-log, which hadn't been registering very well of late, and I had got the cook to bring me a coffee-cup to hold the small screws as I took them out, and a saucer for the sperm-oil I was going to use.
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