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Updated: May 27, 2025
Said one, "I have served on board of a whaleman and been accustomed to the most rigid discipline found there. I fear nothing in the line of strictness of rules, but can not bear the idea of being deprived of our school and meeting opportunities. I would do almost anything for the sake of enjoying these." This was the feeling.
The officer of the deck had only time to hail, and she answered, as she went into the fog again, something about Bristol probably, a whaleman from Bristol, Rhode Island, bound out. The fog continued through the night, with a very light breeze, before which we ran to the eastward, literally feeling our way along.
But to what ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts will show. Of the names in this list of whale authors only those following Owen ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing authority.
It nowhere appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I claim him for one of our clan.
Why this was so, without anything definite to guide one's reasoning, was difficult to understand, for a better seaman or a smarter whaleman than Mistah Jones did not live of that every one was quite sure.
Inside of five minutes after the first hail the whales spouting from one end of the skyline to the other. We had run into the biggest herd of sperms that the oldest whaleman on the Scarboro had ever seen. Maybe we didn't feel excited! At such times as this one forgets the "grind." There was both money and excitement ahead of us.
What is known to whalers as a toggle-harpoon is a modification of the lily-iron, but so greatly changed by the addition of a pivot by which the head of the harpoon is fastened to the shank that it can hardly be regarded as the same weapon. The lily-iron is, in principle, exactly what a whaleman would describe by the word "toggle."
"If he misses, you can throw a second iron." I was tickled enough at this. Old Tom had given me plenty of advice before about the handling of the harpoon, and I tried to remember all of his teaching as I released my bow oar and took up the first iron. Perhaps it would be interesting to my readers if I told them something about this weapon of the whaleman.
See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps often but old bottles and vials, though to the copper cooler at the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore, unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass butter in April.
Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew, upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted and worn out.
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