Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 24, 2025
So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man.
It designates the dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland or right whale, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan. Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's vocabulary. But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so.
And in this chapter it was, headed, "Smeer," or "Fat," that I found a long detailed list of the outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following: 0084400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs.
And so nimble were their movements, and so gentle the manner in which they dispensed their courtesies, that I began to regret my bachelorhood, and to wish all male attendants exiled to Nantucket, where their habitual unclean condition would find a welcome among the whalemen. I had well nigh dispatched my breakfast, when there arose a loud noise, as of voices in dispute, in the bar-room.
Yet accidents like these only spurred the whalemen on to greater efforts, not of mere bravado, but of daring skill.
Moreover, I reasoned that if he had been foolhardy before, he was likely to be much more so now, having no superior to look black or use language when a disaster occurred. For now I was his harpooner, bound to take as many risks as he chose to incur, and anxious also to earn a reputation among the more seasoned whalemen for smartness sufficient to justify my promotion.
Some of these were what whalemen call 'shoal birds, 'wide-awakes, 'molly-hawks, 'whale birds' and 'mutton birds. Among them were some hundreds of frigate birds, the katafa of the Ellice Islanders, and a few magnificently plum-aged fishers, called kanapu by the natives of Equatorial Polynesia.
In many of the preceding pages I have, though possessing all an Englishman's pride in the prowess of mine own people, been compelled to bear witness to the wonderful smartness and courage shown by the American whalemen, to whom their perilous calling seems to have become a second nature.
I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in the chase; but long experience in various whalemen of more than one nation has convinced me that in the vast majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them.
The vicious custom of "advances" mentioned above has become a part of the system; it arose, I suppose, from the fact that the natives who shipped as whalemen received advance pay; and thus the plantation laborers demanded it too.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking