222 THE AMERICAN WHALEMAN 



bers of the crew had no voice. Instead, they contributed their 

 labor throughout the voyage, often under conditions of hard- 

 ship, privation, and imminent danger, and in addition assumed 

 their full share of the risks of the enterprise, financial as well as 

 physical. The owners, on the other hand, undertook the re- 

 sponsibilities of management, the assumption of business, 

 physical, and labor risks, and the provision of enough capital 

 to furnish vessel, food, equipment, and the advances of cash 

 and supplies necessitated by the penniless condidon of the fore- 

 mast hands. Food and bunk space, such as they were, were 

 guaranteed to all members of a crew as long as they remained 

 on board. 



The earnings of a whaleman thus constituted a reward not 

 only for the performance of labor under peculiarly trying con- 

 ditions, but also for the assumption of personal, business, and 

 physical risks. For the size of his lay, representing wages, de- 

 pended directly upon the business risks centering about price 

 fluctuations as well as upon the physical risks of storm, fire, 

 stranding, and poor luck on the whaling grounds. Even after 

 oil had been taken it was at the crew^s risk as long as it was in 

 the vessel. Consequently wages varied with profits, and were 

 payable only in direct proportion to the amount of profits. If 

 the profits of a given voyage were great, the earnings of the 

 crew were correspondingly High j if profits were small, earnings 

 were lowj while if there were no profits at all, wages, too, dis- 

 appeared entirely or were reduced to a nominal sum. 



Obviously, then, this lay system partially shifted the most 

 distinctive and onerous entrepreneurial function, the bearing 

 of industrial risk, from the entrepreneur to the worker. In- 

 stead of the usual situation in which the entrepreneur con- 

 tracted to pay a definite rate of wages to his workmen and as- 

 sumed the risks of an industry, a special condition was created 

 under which the whaling merchant materially lightened his 

 financial burdens by proportioning his wages bill to the amount 

 of his profits. And obviously the more his risks were decreased 

 in this manner, the more were those of his workers increased. 

 For their wages depended not upon the mere performance of 

 certain stipulated kinds and amounts of labor, as in the ordinary 



