Towing a dead Whale. The Galvanism for weary Muscles.

laborious, and fraught, too, with danger when the ship is distant and nightfall at hand. Under a fierce equatorial sun, to row for hours, perhaps right to windward or in a dead calm, with a carcass of seventy tons' weight dragging astern, will blister the hands and strain the muscles of the hardiest whaleman, and wearied nature will sometimes give out. But it is cheerfully endured for the end in view, of cutting in, and trying out, and stowing down a "hundred barreler," that will net to the ship three thousand or fifteen hundred dollars, according as it is a sperm or a right whale. If money makes the mare go, so does oil the crew of a 66 blubber hunter," from the green cabinboy to the sable doctor.

Rhymes of an Ancient Mariner.

CHAPTER VI.

DIFFERENT CRUISING

GROUNDS AND NORTHWEST WHALING.

Thou didst, O Lord! create the mighty whale,
That wondrous monster of prodigious length:
Vast are his head and body, vast his tail;

Beyond conception his unmeasured strength.
When he the surface of the sea hath broke,
Arising from the dark abyss below,

His breath appears a lofty stream of smoke,

The circling waves like glittering banks of snow.-Anon.

T will be readily surmised that none but a

IT

genuine son of the sea, a veritable Cape Horner, "homeward bound," in the great South Pacific, could make these characteristic rhymes, and many other rude but expressive ones, which there is not room to transcribe here. The sailor that made them says of himself, in the course of some doggerel staves of autobiography,

I twice into the dark abyss was cast,

Straining and struggling to retain my breath;
Thy waves and billows over me were past;

Thou didst, O Lord! deliver me from death.

Different practised whalemen tell me of

Different Whales Enumerated.

The Razor-back.

twelve or fourteen different species of this great sea monster: right, sperm, black-fish, humpback, razor-back, fin-back, grampus, sulphurbottom, killer, cow-fish, porpoise, nar whale, scrag whale, and elephant whale. In the attempt to capture one of the latter kind, a New London ship, not long since, lost eleven men, including the first mate. The first four of this catalogue only are much sought after for their oil; now and then some of the others are taken by chance. The razor-back is sometimes one hundred and five feet long, but not so large round as the right whale, bearing about the same comparison to the latter that a razor-faced fellow you now and then meet with among men does to a fair, round alderman. The porpoise, as every one knows, is harpooned from a ship's bow, hauled on board, and its carcass eaten by the name of " sea beef." Its oil, like the ship's slush, is a perquisite of the cook's.

The fin-back, so called from a large fin on the ridge of its back, looking just like the gnomon of a dial, is a large whale found all over the ocean, and, could it be taken, would add greatly to the productiveness of the whale fishery. It often comes near a ship with a ringing

G

Gambols of the Fin-back.

How to be Caught.

noise, in spouting, like the sound of bell-metal, but it can seldom be so closely approached by a boat as to dart a harpoon; and when it is struck, it is said to run with such amazing swiftness as to part the line before it can be let out, or compel to cut it loose. Its spout at a distance, especially near the Falkland Islands, where I have seen them in great numbers, flashes up from the ocean just like smoke from the breech of a gun fired in a frosty morning. I have seen the horizon thus, for an extent of many miles, all smoking with them, and the ocean all alive with their gambols. It is not a thing beyond the reach of probability that this hitherto unmolested sea-rover may yet be brought within the all-powerful grasp of predatory man by swivels or air-guns, that shall fire harpoons into him, or poisoned arrows from a distance.

The places where the right whale is now most sought by the adventurous American whaleman are, in the Atlantic Ocean, what are called Main and False Banks, between Africa and Brazil, the parts around the Falkland Islands and Patagonia, and the region of ocean in mid-Atlantic, in the vicinity of the Island of

Various Resorts of the Whale.

Successful Seasons.

Tristan d'Acunha; in the Southern Ocean, south of the Cape of Good Hope, there are the uninhabited Crozettes Islands, St. Paul's, and other parts of the Indian Ocean; in the Pacific Ocean, there are the New Zealand cruising ground, the New Holland, Chili, and the Northwest, from the coast of America clear over to Kamtschatka.

This last is now the great harvest-field of American whalers from May to October; and it will be likely to last longer than any other, because they are prohibited by the Russians from bay whaling, which destroys the cows about the time of calving. Almost all ships fill up there. Some have even thrown overboard provisions to make way for oil. The havoc they make of whales is immense. There are ships that took, during the last season, twenty-five to even thirty-three hundred barrels in a few months. I have heard of one ship that sunk twenty-six whales after she had killed them; of another that killed nine before she saved one; of another that killed six in one day, and all of them sunk; of another that had three boats stove and all the men pitched into the sea, without any one's being lost. This