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Updated: May 20, 2025
There's an end to everythin', even to a whalin' viage. My heart all but choked me the day we put into New Bedford with our cargo of ile. I got my three years' pay in a lump, an' made for New York like a flash of lightnin'. The people hove to and looked at me, as I rushed through the streets like a madman, until I came to the spot where the lodgin'-house stood on West Street.
I met a feller once who had been thar an' he said it wuz a whalin' big town, full uv all kinds uv strange people, an' hevin' an' inquirin' mind I like to see all kinds uv furriners an' size 'em up. Do you reckon, Paul, that New Or-lee-yuns is the biggest city in the world?" "Oh, no, Jim. There are many much larger cities in the old continents, Europe, Asia and Africa."
An' so it's a-goin' to be; an' they've set their hearts on havin' the weddin' same week as the weddin' o' Master Kenneth and Lizzie Gordon; so the fact is they may all marry each other, through other, down the middle and up again, for all I care, 'cause I'm a-goin' on a whalin' voyage to Novy Zembly or Kumskatchkie anywheres to git peace o' mind there!"
"Scared you, I reckon?" he said. "You don't need to feel bad over that. Any one's got a right to be scared when a whale's chargin' the boat. I've been whalin' for nigh on forty-five years an' that's only the second devil-whale I've ever killed with a hand-lance. He pretty near caught us with his flukes that first time, too!"
"I never heard that whales cared much about literatoor," the sailor answered with an attempt at rough humor, "an' anyway, most o' them books you've been readin', lad, are written about whalin' off Greenland an' in the Atlantic." "What difference does that make?" queried Colin. "Isn't a whale the same sort of animal all the world over?"
"The skipper don't know much more about boat-whalin' than you do," he said, "that was all done away before his time. He's willin' to tackle anythin' that comes along, all right, but a whalin' boat is just about the riskiest thing that floats on water." "How's that, Hank?" asked the boy. "I always thought they were supposed to be so seaworthy."
"Where does the sperm whale come in?" asked Colin. "It's got teeth, like the gray whale," was the reply, "but you never find it in cold water. Sperm whalin' is comin' into favor again. But those two over there the ones we're after, are finbacks. You can tell by the spout, by the fin, by not seein' the flukes of the tail, an' by the way they play around, slappin' each other in fun."
"She hails from New Bedford, doesn't she?" "She took the Indian Ocean whalin' in the sixties an' came round the Horn every season in the seventies," Hank replied; "an' there's not many of her build left. Easy with that oar, Gloomy," he added, speaking to the melancholy sailor, who was splashing a good deal in his stroke, "an' avast talkin', all."
Ye niver see such a lot iv thim, Cassidy, O'Regan, Hogan, Mulcahey, Shay, Mullaney, Mullvihill, an' th' eight O'Neills, all sint through be Doheny without cridintials. Sure, it looked like a meetin' iv th' Wolf Tones. It did that. "Th' op'ra was on whin we wint in, an' they was whalin' away in Eyetallian. Duggan listened; an' says he, 'What's the man sayin'? he says. 'I dinnaw, I says.
As for Cap'en Twist, he wouldn't come back for his own father, unless he was short o' hands for whalin'. I was in for life, no doubt on't; and I'd better look at the fair-weather side of the thing.
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