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Updated: June 5, 2025
In 1835, the heyday of the colonial whaling trade, when the smoky glare of the whaleships' try-works lit up the darkness of the Pacific ocean night, there were forty-one vessels, of a total tonnage of 9,257 tons, registered in New South Wales, employed in the fishery.
Appeared a little red-satin Spanish girdle, whale-boned like a tiny corset, pointed, the pioneer finery of a frontier woman who had crossed the plains. It was hand-made after the California-Spanish model of forgotten days. The very whalebone had been home-shaped of the raw material from the whaleships traded for in hides and tallow. The black lace trimming her mother had made.
And it was just as well, for during those six months another whale-ship arrived, watered and was avoided. "Blisther it!" said he; "the say here seems to breed whale-ships, and nothin' but whaleships. It's like bugs in a bed: you kill wan, and then another comes. Howsumever, we're shut of thim for a while." He walked down to the lagoon edge, looked at the little dark spot and whistled.
But the clubs of the murderous Solomon Islanders the country of the people in which he had already planned out vast achievements on paper battered out his brains almost under the guns of his beautiful armed yacht, the Wanderer; and the name of Ben Boyd was now alone remembered by a decayed village and a ruined lighthouse on the south headland of Twofold Bay, in New South Wales, where, in the days of his prosperity, he had erected it, as a guide to the numerous American and English whaleships, which in those times traversed the Pacific from one end to the other, and would, he imagined, eagerly avail themselves of the quiet, landlocked harbour to repair and recruit, and sell their cargoes of sperm oil.
My new captain gave us a house to live in, and every night I came on shore. Ah, those were brave times, and Preston made much of me when he found that I was a true man and did my work well, and would stand no saucy words nor black looks from those of the schooner's crew who thought that the boatswain should be a white man. "Ten days after the whaleships had sailed, the schooner was ready for sea.
"'Way back in de dark ages, w'en de whaleships war de pi'neers ob commerce, 'n day wan't no worryin', poofity-plukity steamboats a-poundin' along, 'nough ter galley ebery whale clean eout ob dere skin, dey war plenty whaleships fill up in twelve, fifteen, twenty monf' after leabin' home.
Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs at the mast-heads of the whaleships, now penetrating even through Behring's straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.
Then followed years of quiet, for only a very few of the whaleships returned, and, one by one, most of the white men wandered away to the far distant isles of the north-west, taking their wives and families with them, till there were but five or six remaining in the whole Ellice Group. Among those who sailed away one day in a whale-ship was a trader named Harry. His surname was never known.
They discovered that whaleships are not the leviathans of the deep which Mysie had supposed them, being very rarely of a thousand tons, and averaging five hundred.
I was then a boat-steerer in an English ship a good and lucky ship with a good captain. When we came to Ponapé we found there six other whaleships, all anchored close together under the shelter of the two islets.
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