Tenacity of Life in the Shark. Credible Tales of Sailors. life, or, rather, life to the shark, is astonishing, and hardly to be credited by one who has not himself observed it. We have caught a number on this passage for their skin, which, cleansed and dry, is an excellent substitute for sand-paper, much used in whale ships to smooth and polish the various things they make up out of whale's bone and teeth. One that we hauled upon deck, after it was cut open, and the heart and all the internal viscera were removed, would still flap and thrash with its tail, and try to bite it off. The heart was contracting for twenty minutes after it was taken out and pierced with the knife. And, from what I have myself seen, I could not ridicule or deny a story that one has told me of a shark's being known to swim off, upon being thrown overboard, after it was opened, gutted, and had its tail chopped off. Sailors don't like them a bit, but kill them whenever they can; and there is little wonder, considering they are so likely to be themselves eaten by this greedy ranger through the paths of the sea. To have done with our whale, it remains to finish bailing the case, and to cut out the blubber of the junk from the part of it called "white Labor and Painstaking of Whalemen. Oily Processes. horse," which is a tough, stringy, and slightly elastic substance interposed with it, that contains little or no oil, and is as good as a cotton bale to shield a sperm whale's head from blows. Then follows the trying out, stowing down, overhauling, and coopering again the hogsheads of this valuable fluid, which they on land, who are turning night into day by means of its clear light, little know the hazard and labor of American whalemen in procuring. At the completion of the voyage this oil will be drawn from the casks, and, after a process of boiling and cooling, will be put into vats with a strainer which detains the spermaceti mixed with oil. It is then a yellow viscous substance, which is afterward put into strong canvass bags, and subjected to a screw press, and next to the pressure of the hydraulic engine, whereby the oily matter is all expelled, leaving the spermaceti in hard, concrete masses. This, after boiling with potash and purifying, is molded into those beautiful oilless candles which are sold under the name of spermaceti. The first manufactory of sperm candles in America was started in Rhode Island in 1750, by one Benjamin Crab, an Englishman. By L Sperm Candle Manufactories. American Industry. the year 1761 there were eight in New England and one in Philadelphia. Owing to the increased influx of sperm, by reason of the energetic and widely-extended prosecution of the sperm whale fishery, the number of spermaceti candle manufactories is now greatly increased. In 1834 it was estimated that there were sixty of them constantly in operation, and the quantity of sperm candles then made was three millions of pounds. For the well-deserved commendation of this branch of American industry, all persons in any way connected with it will be as pleased as we in the Commodore Preble have been at the way in which New England enterprise was toasted at the New England Society's last dinner in New York. There is an account of the Anniversary of the Pilgrims' Landing, and the festivities of the occasion, in a paper to which we have been treated from an outward-bound whale ship just fallen in with. How greedily we have devoured it, none but a news-hungry whaleman knows. "New England enterprise : It grapples with the monsters of the Pacific to illuminate our dwellings, and with the problems of science to enlighten our minds." New England Enterprise. Hopeful Future. Now if the lines of commercial enterprise can be only kept from parting with the rectilinear of moral propriety and the law of God, our career of greatness as a nation is clear and glorious. The great future is before us, full of hope, if old Puritan principles be only at the head with modern New England enterprise. Far, like the comet's way through infinite space, Till the receding rays are lost to human sight. I love thee; next to Heaven above, I love thee when I hear thy voice In every tongue, Messiah's name; The other Side. CHAPTER XI. A moving Incident. AUTHENTIC TRAGEDIES AND PERILS OF THE WHAL IN ING SERVICE. At length his comrades, who before For then, by toil subdued, he drank N this Daguerreotype gallery of Life and Adventures in a Whale Ship, it is but fair that our late experience of the bright side of whalemen's fortune, in the safe capture and stowing down of a noble hundred-barrel spermaceti, as told in the last chapter, should be set off by incidents of another character that are equally common. A writer in the London Quarterly, a few years ago, described an adventure in the pursuit of a whale, which, given here for substance with some additions, will be read with deep interest by all who are anywise familiar |