Midday North and South 223 



were driven into the sides of their companions from a range of only 

 a few feet. 



The slaughter was consequently quite monumental, for no sooner 

 had one whale been struck than it was lanced to death and left to 

 float just beneath the rollers while another was attacked. There were 

 seven hours of daylight for the chase and the boats never got farther 

 than a mile from the Shannon. Seventeen whales were struck, six- 

 teen of them fast, and fifteen killed. Everybody took turns in the 

 boats, even the captain, the cook, the supercargo, and the smithy, 

 Colin Collins. And it was he who struck three whales, an altogether 

 unique experience for any man throughout the centuries on the very 

 first day he had ever been in a whaleboat or hefted a harpoon. 



But then they were his own harpoons, fashioned by his own hand 

 and tempered with a loving care that expressed more than just good 

 craftsmanship. Into them he had wrought something of his new- 

 found glory, for this onetime bondsman, slave, and convict had 

 found a new world in the green land of Tasmania and a new life in 

 the pursuit of the oldest bonanza on earth, the whale. 



There was nothing particularly remarkable about the slaughter of 

 a lot of whales wholly taken up with some parody of what is now 

 called sexual play in the lonely confines of a south Australian inlet, 

 but in the year 1828 the outcome reached far beyond the immediate 

 success of a chance whaling venture by an Irish captain out of the 

 little colonial settlement of Launceston in the new colony of Tas- 

 mania. It was just such an everyday incident that started a systematic 

 exploration of the entire southern coast of a vast new continent and, 

 in its way, changed the whole history of the world. Young men such 

 as Colin Collins, long since forgotten and never chronicled, made this 

 possible, despite the iniquities of slavery, the vile practices of bond- 

 age and apprenticeship, the enormities of indentured labor, imprison- 

 ment for political originality, religious persecution, and all the other 

 foul injustices to which citizens were subjected in the early nine- 

 teenth century. On the simple hard work of such as he, combined 

 with the new-found freedom of others who colonized the southern 

 continent, a vast industry was founded, and a great nation grew. 



Just what such people, ejected from their homelands often for no 



