54 THE AMERICAN WHALEMAN 



reputation as capable boatmen and lookouts, though but in- 

 different seamen. Large numbers of them became boat- 

 steerers} and often they were shipped as mates. 



Appraisals of their personal characteristics differed with the 

 vantage points of the observers. With few exceptions, con- 

 temporary writers who had actually lived in a forecastle in- 

 sisted that the Portuguese were generally dirty and bestial j 

 while the officers tended to favor them because of their long- 

 suffering docility under poor food and abuse and their willing- 

 ness to ship for "long lays" (low wages) under loose agree- 

 ments whose terms could be readily reinterpreted. Certainly 

 many of them were veritable marvels of thrift and of parsi- 

 mony. Their slop-chest accounts, showing the supplies drawn 

 during the course of a voyage, were often negligible in 

 amount, and far below the average of the other hands. 



Some of the Portuguese hands eked out their earnings by 

 washing clothes for their less thrifty shipmates. Since the 

 whalemen were often bathed in perspiration and exposed to 

 innumerable forms of dirt and grease, and since their clothing 

 was periodically saturated with whale oils and salt water, the 

 task of washing such garments was hardly agreeable. It was 

 rendered all the more laborious, too, because the scrubbing had 

 to be done in salt water j for fresh water was available for 

 cleansing purposes only when rain water could be caught upon 

 deck. It was not surprising, therefore, that at times certain 

 members of a crew were willing to pay trifling sums to escape 

 such tedious laundry work. 



While on shipboard both Portuguese and South Sea Is- 

 landers often answered to curious names which further ac- 

 centuated the rough-and-ready cosmopolitanism of the crews. 

 Whenever foreign names presented too many difficulties of 

 pronunciation, their owners were dubbed with any sobriquets 

 which came to mind. This was particularly true of the Kan- 

 akas. Many untutored Pacific whalemen bore names drawn 

 from the honored aristocracy of New England 5 and numerous 

 account-books bear witness to the fact that John Quincy Adams 

 was shipped at a lay of /4oo, or that Samuel Adams drew divers 

 quantities of tobacco from the slop-chest. In other cases they 

 were given single names such as Peter, Henry, Frank, James — 



