United States or Guatemala ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Given a good breeze and plenty of daylight, the whale-ships of the olden days could stand round the western horn of the island, a projecting point rendered pleasingly conspicuous by the grove of graceful coco-palms which Cook was so glad to observe so many years before, and then enter a deep bay on the north-west coast, where they obtained good anchorage in from fifteen to twenty fathoms of water of the most wonderful transparency, and within a mile of the vast stretches of white sandy beach that trend away for miles on either hand.
Sailors deserters from whale-ships had been seen lurking about the outskirts of the town, and low scrub oaks which everywhere beset the trail might have easily concealed some desperate runaway.
Hence, in whale-ships and merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain; and so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in the after part of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the captain's cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with it.
It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas.
We know not where they find the stuff, and they won't tell. I shall go and find out for myself, and take back plenty of it to our people." The "hard stuff" referred to was hoop-iron, which, as well as nails and a few hatchets, the Eskimos of the eastern parts of the Arctic shores obtained from whale-ships and passed on to their friends in the more remote regions of the farther north.
As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed "Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!" "What was it, Sir?" said Flask. "The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it."
Should the excitement continue through the year, and the whale-ships visit San Francisco, I think they will lose most all their crews. How Col. Mason can retain his men, unless he puts a force on the spot, I know not.
As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed "Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!" "What was it, Sir?" said Flask. "The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it."
The captain of the POCAHONTAS was a little, withered-up old man with sharp, deep-set eyes of brightest blue, and had the reputation of possessing the most fiery and excitable temper of any of the captains of the sixty or seventy American whale-ships that in those days cruised the Pacific from the West Coast of South America to Gaum in the Ladrones.
But, remembering the general shape of the harpoon-heads used in whale-ships, I managed to cut one of that pattern out of walrus ivory, and this I set on the end of the 'Dean's Delight, and then, making a hole in the centre of it, I fastened it to the end of one of our long lines. The seal had evidently been off breathing in another hole.
Word Of The Day