PROFITS AND THE COUNTING-ROOM 275 



The full extent of entrepreneurial risk, however, was re- 

 flected most clearly in the extraordinary variations in the size 

 and value of individual cargoes. The records of the industry 

 are replete with instances in which vessels returned to port 

 with catches which were either ruinously small or astoundingly 

 profitable. Among the unlucky voyages which must have 

 tried the souls of owners and crews, for example, were those 

 of the brig Emeliney of New Bedford, which returned after 

 26 months at sea with only ten barrels of oilj of the Clijford 

 Wayne, of Fairhaven, which was forced to put back into port 

 at a loss of $10,000 after a mutiny j and of the Benjamin 

 Rush, of Warren, which lost an entire boat's crew in an en- 

 counter with an "ugly" whale oflF the coast of Japan, circum- 

 navigated the globe, and reported only 90 barrels of oil after 

 a full year's cruising.'^ 



For consistent and long-continued ill fortune, however, few 

 records equal that of the bark Tem-pest, of New London. 

 The Tempest put to sea on May 21, 1857, under command of 

 Captain G. L. Allyn, a veteran whaleman who had made sev- 

 eral successful voyages. On September 8, after having visited 

 Spitzbergen and East Greenland without success. Captain Al- 

 lyn found himself near the Azores without having sighted a 

 single whale. Continuing southward he rounded the Cape of 

 Good Hope and entered the Indian Ocean, where on the last 

 day of the year he finally filled his try-pots for the first time 

 during the voyage. Thence the vessel was steered over the 

 regular cruising grounds of the South Pacific, the North Pa- 

 cific, and the Sea of Okhotsk without a break in the continuous 

 round of poor luck. After three years of cruising, so little oil 

 had been obtained that the voyage was practically a total lossj 

 and at Honolulu the Tempest was finally turned over to an- 

 other master.* 



But the accounts of surprisingly successful voyages afford 

 an even more striking illustration of the capricious fortune 

 which often attended a whaling cruise. Preeminent in this 

 respect was the colorful history of the ship Envoy, of New 

 Bedford. During a period of fourteen years, 1 833-1 847, 



"^ See Starbuck, A., "History of the American Whale Fishery," p. 149. 

 'Brown, J. T., in "Fisheries and Fishery Industries," VII, p. 293. 



