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Updated: June 24, 2025
From the first American whaleships that visited us he bought two fine whaleboats and all the necessary gear, and then later on engaged one of the best whalemen in the South Seas to superintend the business. In the first season we killed no less than six sperm whales, and could have taken more, but were short of barrels.
The solid, square houses the whalemen built, stoutly timbered as though themselves ships, faced the ocean, and bore on their ridge-pole a railed platform called the bridge, whence the watchers could look far out to sea, scanning the horizon for the expected ship. Lucky were they if she came into the harbor without half-masted flag or other sign of disaster.
All these things are not without their meanings. But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me.
But to Gloucester belongs the glory of sending the first schooner to the Grand Bank. * From these two rock-bound harbors went thousands of trained seamen to man the privateers and the ships of the Continental navy, slinging their hammocks on the gun-decks beside the whalemen of Nantucket.
Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of determining the vessel's place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the log; though at the same time, and frequently more for form's sake than anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary slate the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of progression every hour.
In short, he was none of your effeminate barbarians. Previous to this, he had been two or three voyages in Sydney whalemen; always, however, as in the present instance, shipping at the Bay of Islands, and receiving his discharge there on the homeward-bound passage. In this way, his countrymen frequently enter on board the colonial whaling vessels.
Here he succeeded in raising a sort of degenerate potatoes and pumpkins, which from time to time he exchanged with needy whalemen passing, for spirits or dollars.
It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the other seamen my first mast-head came round. In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously with the vessel's leaving her port; even though she may have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground.
Now, as those polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen, including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks' allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin.
I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation, sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he was a very great favourite.
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