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Updated: June 8, 2025
We were at Punta Arenas in a few hours, and the very next morning the bark was warped in beside the tramp steamer and the oil in the whaler's tanks was being pumped aboard the steamship. The men were given short shore leave; but Captain Rogers put Paul Downes in the care of Bill Rudd, the carpenter, and made him responsible for him.
It was a new world; Jeanne the one connecting link between the present and that still half-shadowy past from which he had been cast by some unceremonial jest of Fate into a strange existence. From the witless, nameless unit of a whaler's crew he had at last arisen to a fresh identity. Frank Starbird, they christened him, he knew not why.
Walk inside the old, broken walls, and you will see, half-buried in the moist, steaming, and malarious ground, some traces of those who dwelt there a piece of chain cable, two or three whaler's trypots, a rotten and mossgrown block or two, only the hardwood sheaves of which have resisted the destroying influences of the climate; a boat anchor, and farther towards the creek, the mouldering remains of a capstan, from the drumhead holes of which long grey-green pendants of moss droop down upon the weather-worn, decaying barrel, like the scanty ragged beard that falls on the chest of some old man worn out with poverty and toil.
The shot appeared to drop into the water almost under the whaler's bob-stay, and sent up a cloud of foam and spray, glistening in the moonlight; but the ship answered to it as to a deadly summons; and the tide and wind setting off shore, she went into the breeze easily, and lay to at the first demand. Then Black gave his orders
Cousin Silas took occasion to urge upon the remainder of the men the importance of keeping together for mutual support; but, from the way the whaler's crew took his advice, I saw that they were in no way inclined to follow it. It was with difficulty even that he could persuade them to keep watch at night. That was a trying period with us.
So thought Captain Portveldt, who now hailed the Policy in not quite so boastful a voice as when the vessels met earlier in the day. "Captain Voster, I haf hauled down mein flag. Mein grew will vight no more, and I must surrender." A cheer broke from the whaler's crew. "Very well, Captain Portveldt," called out Foster; "lower a boat, and come on board with half your crew.
Sweers, gazing, nevertheless, up at the ship's side with a flat face of reluctance and doubt. I grasped a boat's fall and went up hand over hand, and Sweers followed me. The angle of the deck was considerable, but owing to the flat bilge of the whaler's bottom, not greater than the inclination of the deck of a ship under a heavy press of canvas. It was possible to walk.
Tired as we all were, very little sleep came to us that night we were barely seasoned yet to the exigencies of a whaler's life but afterwards I believe nothing short of dismasting or running the ship ashore would wake us, once we got to sleep. In the morning we commenced operations in a howling gale of wind, which placed the lives of the officers on the "cutting in" stage in great danger.
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