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Updated: June 8, 2025
"A-a-away Racing Whaler's Crew!" shouted the cracked high tenor. "Man your boat!" "There you are!" said the Blacksmith, a silent, bearded man. "What are we all 'angin' on to the slack for? Come on deck. That's the first race." Regatta-day, even in War-time, was a day of high carnival.
"Nub has been telling her that we probably shall not have much fighting, as the battle will soon be over, and we shall no doubt take the enemy." The brig was soon within range of the whaler's guns, and showed her readiness for the fight by firing the first shot, which came crashing through the bulwarks, and striking one man to the deck.
An hour later, dinner having been postponed on account of their near proximity to the land, the two vessels entered a commodious natural harbour called Hyde Bay, and anchored there for the night, in order to give the whaler's exhausted crew an opportunity to snatch a few hours of much-needed rest.
It consisted of wild, half-amphibious boys, slowly moving backwards, as they were compelled by the pressure of the coming multitude to go on, and yet anxious to defy and annoy the gang by insults, and curses half choked with their indignant passion, doubling their fists in the very faces of the gang who came on with measured movement, armed to the teeth, their faces showing white with repressed and determined energy against the bronzed countenances of the half-dozen sailors, who were all they had thought it wise to pick out of the whaler's crew, this being the first time an Admiralty warrant had been used in Monkshaven for many years; not since the close of the American war, in fact.
She must have looked ghostly enough, that broken-down steamer, rolling in that snowstorm a dark apparition in a world of white snowflakes to the staring eyes of that whaler's crew. Evidently they didn't believe in ghosts, for on arrival into port her captain unromantically reported having sighted a disabled steamer in latitude somewhere about 50 degrees S. and a longitude still more uncertain.
At that time I was so near the ship, as to make out she was a whaler; and, nothing doubting of being in sight of you in the morning, I thought it safer to pull alongside of her, than to try to hunt for the schooner in the dark. I found an old shipmate in the whaler's captain, who was looking for a boat that had struck adrift the night before; and both parties were pleased.
His Majesty, who was a curious combination of piety and inborn wickedness, and spoke whaler's English with great facility, bought about 200 dollar's worth of prints and cutlery, and then proceeded to get drunk.
"Quick!" he exclaimed, and, at the word, she dropped into his upstretched arms. Scarcely had she escaped, however, before the landlord was seen at the same window. So astonished was he to find her gone, surprise at first held him speechless; then he burst into a volley of oaths that would have shamed a whaler's master. "Come back!" he cried.
Now it is a curious fact, that at that identical moment the captain of the cruiser addressed his first lieutenant in precisely the same words, for he had caught a glimpse of the whaler's topmasts against the dark sky, and mistook them, very naturally, for those of the slaver. In a few seconds the man-of-war was in full pursuit.
Fifty years ago there were something like twenty whalers in the Hobart Fleet alone; now, one or two hulks lying in Whaler's "Rotten Row" is practically all that survives of the trade. The Americans took a leading part in the industry, and ships with New Bedford or Nantucket under their sterns traversed the Pacific from one end to the other.
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