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_ Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she
hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby,
merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of
Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion, comes
not far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in
point of real historical interest. How long, prior to the year of
our Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous
fish-documents do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted
out the first English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm
Whale; though for some score of years previous (ever since 1726) our
valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard had in large
fleets pursued that Leviathan, but only in the North and South
Atlantic: not elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here, that the
Nantucketers were the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized
steel the great Sperm Whale; and that for half a century they were
the only people of the whole globe who so harpooned him.
In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose,
and at the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape
Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a whale-boat of
any sort in the great South Sea. The voyage was a skilful and lucky
one; and returning to her berth with her hold full of the precious
sperm, the Amelia's example was soon followed by other ships, English
and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific
were thrown open. But not content with this good deed, the
indefatigable house again bestirred itself: Samuel and all his
Sons--how many, their mother only knows--and under their immediate
auspices, and partly, I think, at their expense, the British
government was induced to send the sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling
voyage of discovery into the South Sea. Commanded by a naval
Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and did some
service; how much does not appear. But this is not all. In 1819,
the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own, to go
on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That ship--well
called the "Syren"--made a noble experimental cruise; and it was thus
that the great Japanese Whaling Ground first became generally known.
The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a
Nantucketer.
All honour to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists
to the present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long
ago have slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other
world.
The ship named after him was worthy of the honour, being a very fast
sailer and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight
somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the
forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all
trumps--every soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly
death. And that fine gam I had--long, very long after old Ahab
touched her planks with his ivory heel--it minds me of the noble,
solid, Saxon hospitality of that ship; and may my parson forget me,
and the devil remember me, if I ever lose sight of it. Flip? Did I
say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it at the rate of ten gallons
the hour; and when the squall came (for it's squally off there by
Patagonia), and all hands--visitors and all--were called to reef
topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each other aloft
in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our jackets into
the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the howling gale, a
warning example to all drunken tars. However, the masts did not go
overboard; and by and by we scrambled down, so sober, that we had to
pass the flip again, though the savage salt spray bursting down the
forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it to my
taste.
The beef was fine--tough, but with body in it. They said it was
bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for
certain, how that was. They had dumplings too; small, but
substantial, symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I
fancied that you could feel them, and roll them about in you after
they were swallowed. If you stooped over too far forward, you risked
their pitching out of you like billiard-balls. The bread--but that
couldn't be helped; besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the
bread contained the only fresh fare they had. But the forecastle was
not very light, and it was very easy to step over into a dark corner
when you ate it. But all in all, taking her from truck to helm,
considering the dimensions of the cook's boilers, including his own
live parchment boilers; fore and aft, I say, the Samuel Enderby was a
jolly ship; of good fare and plenty; fine flip and strong; crack
fellows all, and capital from boot heels to hat-band.
But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other
English whalers I know of--not all though--were such famous,
hospitable ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread, and the
can, and the joke; and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking,
and laughing? I will tell you. The abounding good cheer of these
English whalers is matter for historical research. Nor have I been
at all sparing of historical whale research, when it has seemed
needed.
The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders,
Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant
in the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions,
touching plenty to eat and drink. For, as a general thing, the
English merchant-ship scrimps her crew; but not so the English
whaler. Hence, in the English, this thing of whaling good cheer is
not normal and natural, but incidental and particular; and,
therefore, must have some special origin, which is here pointed out,
and will be still further elucidated.
During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an
ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew
must be about whalers. The title was, "Dan Coopman," wherefore I
concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam
cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I
was reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production
of one "Fitz Swackhammer." But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very
learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of
Santa Claus and St. Pott's, to whom I handed the work for
translation, giving him a box of sperm candles for his trouble--this
same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the book, assured me that "Dan
Coopman" did not mean "The Cooper," but "The Merchant." In short,
this ancient and learned Low Dutch book treated of the commerce of
Holland; and, among other subjects, contained a very interesting
account of its whale fishery. 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:
400,000 lbs. of beef.
60,000 lbs. Friesland pork.
150,000 lbs. of stock fish.
550,000 lbs. of biscuit.
72,000 lbs. of soft bread.
2,800 firkins of butter.
20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese.
144,000 lbs. cheese (probably an inferior article).
550 ankers of Geneva.
10,800 barrels of beer.
Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in
the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole
pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer.
At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all
this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were
incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and
Platonic application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary
tables of my own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc.,
consumed by every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and
Spitzbergen whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter,
and Texel and Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it,
though, to their naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still
more unctuous by the nature of their vocation, and especially by
their pursuing their game in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very
coasts of that Esquimaux country where the convivial natives pledge
each other in bumpers of train oil.
The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. 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. Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so
fuddled as one might fancy them to have been, were the right sort of
men to stand up in a boat's head, and take good aim at flying whales;
this would seem somewhat improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and
hit them too. But this was very far North, be it remembered, where
beer agrees well with the constitution; upon the Equator, in our
southern fishery, beer would be apt to make the harpooneer sleepy at
the mast-head and boozy in his boat; and grievous loss might ensue to
Nantucket and New Bedford.
But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers
of two or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English
whalers have not neglected so excellent an example. For, say they,
when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of
the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least. And this empties
the decanter. _
Read next: CHAPTER 102 A Bower in the Arsacides.
Read previous: CHAPTER 100 Leg and Arm.
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