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Updated: May 18, 2025
We thoroughly overhauled this interior, spending some time in looking about us, for Sweers' fear of beholding something affrighting vanished when he found himself in a plain ship's cabin, with nothing more terrible to behold than the ship's furniture of a whaleman's living-room of near half a century old.
Descriptions of the dying flurry of the sperm-whale are plentiful in whaling literature, many of the best of them being in that ideal whaleman's log "The Cruise of the Cachalot," by Frank T. Bullen. I quote one of these: "Suddenly the mate gave a howl: 'Starn all starn all!
In this last voyage, our adventurer experienced to the extreme all the hardships and privations of the whaleman's life on a long voyage to distant and barbarous waters hardships and privations unknown at the present day, when science has so greatly contributed, in manifold ways, to lessen the sufferings, and add to the comforts of seafaring men.
Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby, merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion, comes not far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point of real historical interest.
And so, having "cut in" our whale, we next proceeded to "try out" the oil. The scenes in a whaleman's life are varied and very stirring. Sometimes he is floating on the calm ocean, idling about the deck and whistling for a breeze, when all of a sudden the loud cry is heard, "There she blows!" and in a moment the boats are in the water, and he is engaged in all the toils of an exciting chase.
Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four years' voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman's career shall be unenervated by any chance display of a father's natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern.
Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman? Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman's can head off like that? Jonah Historically Regarded. Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the preceding chapter.
"Clear away the boats and bear away for him, my hearties." The lashings were cast away, the davit-tackle falls overhauled, and a larboard and starboard boat was launched and manned, and in a few minutes they were dashing over the waves, the men pulling that steady, strong, and even stroke which gives such propelling force to the whaleman's oar.
This implement is precisely similar to a whaleman's lance, except that it is smaller, consisting of a lanceolate blade perhaps one inch wide and two inches long, upon the end of a shank of five-eighths-inch iron, perhaps two or three feet in length, fastened in the ordinary way upon a pole fifteen to eighteen feet in length.
He relates his extraordinary experience thus: "We had been fishing north of the Equator, and had filled up with a little 'grease, as the Yankees term it, round about the Galapagos Islands, but business grew too slack for even a whaleman's patience. Eleven months out from Whitby, and, if my memory fails me not, less than a score of full barrels in our hold!
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