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Updated: May 7, 2025
"'Animal food is a luxury obtained with difficulty once or twice in the week; and though we have, by dint of very hard labor, been enabled to obtain cloth and other indispensable necessaries from whale-ships, in exchange for potatoes, yet this resource is beginning to fail us; not from scarcity of visitors, but from inability on our part to supply them.
Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships' standing orders, "Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time."
So she shook her head, and sobbed good-bye to Buzzby, as she ascended the sloping avenue that led to her pretty cottage, on the green hill that overlooked the harbour and the sea beyond. To make a long story short, three years passed away, but the Pole Star did not return, and no news of her could be got from the various whale-ships that visited the port of Grayton.
Every endeavour was undoubtedly made to instruct them in their duties, albeit the teachers were all too apt to beat their information in with anything that came to hand, and persuasion found no place in their methods. The reports I had always heard of the laziness prevailing on board whale-ships were now abundantly falsified. From dawn to dark work went on without cessation.
In the whale-fisheries, no doubt, he has more than enough of excitement, but after a time he gets used to this, and begins to long for a little variety and of all the pleasures that fall to his lot, that which delights him most is to have a GAM with another ship. Now, a gam is the meeting of two or more whale-ships, their keeping company for a time, and the exchanging of visits by the crews.
There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale's and Bennett's; both in their time surgeons to English South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact and reliable men.
Now, a gam is the meeting of two or more whale-ships, their keeping company for a time, and the exchanging of visits by the crews. It is neither more nor less than a jollification on the sea, the inviting of your friends to feast and make merry in your floating house.
Ailie, go it, my lass!" interrupted Glynn; "and horses, and ponies, and carts, and cats, and blackbirds, and cocks and hens, and ploughmen, and milkmaids, and beggars, all in the foreground; and coaches, and railroads, and steamboats, and palaces, and canals, in the middle distance; with a glorious background of the mighty sea glittering for ever under the blazing beams of a perpetually setting sun, mingled with the pale rays of an eternally rising moon, and laden with small craft, and whale-ships, and seaweed, and fish, and bumboats, and men-of-war!"
So she shook her head, and sobbed good-bye to Buzzby, as she ascended the sloping avenue that led to her pretty cottage on the green hill that overlooked the harbour and the sea beyond. To make a long story short, three years passed away, but the Pole Star did not return, and no news of her could be got from the various whale-ships that visited the port of Grayton.
But suddenly the advent of the civil war let loose among those peaceable cruisers the devastating ALABAMA, whose course was marked in some parts of the world by the fires of blazing whale-ships.
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