66 THE AMERICAN WHALEMAN 



home. Letters of instruction contained frequent admonitions 

 to watch the men so closely that there would be no opportunity 

 to leave the vessel during the early part of a voyage, when the 

 catch was still small. Consequently many captains deliber- 

 ately avoided those ports which offered the greatest tempta- 

 tions j or, if compelled to put in, they refused to grant shore 

 leave and weighed anchor at the earliest possible moment. In 

 certain South Sea harbors the natives were sometimes hired 

 to watch seamen while ashore j and it was a common practice 

 to offer rewards for the apprehension and return of deserters. 

 Whalers were anchored well beyond easy swimming distance 

 from the shore, and a careful watch was kept by the mate 

 in charge of the deck. The question was even injected into 

 the original shipping of a crew in the home port 5 for one of 

 the reasons for preferring green hands lay in the fact that 

 they were less resourceful in matters relating to desertion. 



But when a vessel was well filled with oil and bone, so 

 that the lays of those men who had been longest on board were 

 appreciably greater than their obligations to the owners, the 

 captain's vigilance often relaxed significantly. For desertion 

 under such circumstances meant that the confiscation of the 

 entire earnings would leave a tempting sum as net gain to 

 owners or masters. In fact, charges were made that certain of 

 the more grasping and unscrupulous officers not only looked 

 with equanimity upon such cases of desertion, but actually took 

 steps to bring them about. This might be done either by 

 means of "working a man up" (subjecting him to such cruel 

 and abusive treatment and such long periods of gruelling work 

 that he was driven to leave the vessel in sheer desperation), 

 or by employing some real or alleged offense as a pretext for 

 sailing without him. 



The part played by the quarter-deck in stimulating such 

 late-voyage desertion was mentioned by so careful and in- 

 formed an observer as Lieutenant Wilkes. Writing in the 

 forties, he said: "Many Americans are found on the dif- 

 ferent islands, who have been turned ashore from whale-ships, 

 or left because they have broken their liberty a single time, 

 near the end of a voyage. Such treatment leaves too much 

 ground to believe that they are purposely left, in order to in- 



