THE WHALEMAN ASHORE 85 



years and growing scarcity of game, voyages of four to four 

 and one-half years became increasingly common. 



Perhaps no one had a greater right to speak with authority 

 and feeling on this subject of prolonged absences than the 

 women of the whaling ports. Month after month and even 

 year after year the whaleman's wife was, in all outward re- 

 spects, the whaleman's widow. One woman, married for 

 eleven years, had had her husband at home on just 360 scat- 

 tered days. During a seafaring career of forty-one years 

 Captain Benjamin Worth, of Nantucket, helped to capture 

 20,000 barrels of oil, visited more than forty islands in the 

 Atlantic and Pacific, and sailed some 1,191,000 miles at an 

 average rate of four miles per hour — but found time for 

 only seven years at home. Another Nantucket captain, 

 George W. Gardner, saw even less of his family and friends. 

 During thirty-seven years he traveled about 1,000,000 miles 

 and captured 23,000 barrels of oil, but spent only four years 

 and eight months, in scattered fragments of time, under his 

 own roof.^ The women of the whaling families found in the 

 sea a rival both jealous and exacting. 



Of course there were shorter voyages by other types of 

 whalers. During the mid-century decades a two-season right 

 whaler was gone from twenty-four to thirty-two months j and 

 the one-season right whalers and small Atlantic brigs and 

 schooners managed to return at the end of eight to fourteen 

 months. But these smaller craft never enjoyed the prestige 

 attached to the larger blubber-hunters which roamed all the 

 seas of the world for three to four consecutive years. The 

 contempt of the Pacific whaleman for the short-voyage At- 

 lantic "plum-pud'ners" was well illustrated by the exaggerated 

 yarn of the veteran master who found himself compelled to 

 make a short cruise. He insisted upon regarding the whole 

 voyage as a humorous interlude, and finally embarked with- 

 out troubling to bid farewell even to his wife, because, as he 

 remarked casually, he would "only be gone for a year any- 

 way." * 



3 See Macy, Obed, "History of Nantucket." pp. 220S. 



* See Macy, W. F., and Hussey, R. B., "The Nantucket Scrap Basket," for a 

 collection of quaint and colorful whaling yarns. 



