IV 



THE OLD copperplates, with their titanic whales playing 

 about vast ships off the shores of diminutive continents, 

 show the whalemen at work and play. Here are ''harpuneers" 

 plying weapons whose barbs spread to twice the diameter of a 

 man's head. Here are whales that in shape and aspect, even to 

 fins and vertical tails, look for all the world like overgrown cod- 

 fish. Here are coopers hard at work closing casks of oil, sailors 

 cleaning and scraping whalebone, boilers at the coppers — fore- 

 runners of the try-pots of later days — handling blubber and oil; 

 and venturesome spirits advancing with incredible valour 

 against the most absurd bears and those grotesque "seamorces, 

 in quantity as big as an ox," the walruses. There is something 

 singularly fetching about their cranes and windlasses and 

 barrows, as the ancient pictures show them. But through and 

 above the quaintness of the old engravings and narratives stands 

 out the fortitude of those men who endured hardships and 

 braved dangers as great as, or greater than, those faced by any 

 whalemen of later times. 



On the first day of May, 1630, a crew of English whalemen 

 set sail from London in the good ship Salutation, bound for 

 Greenland on a whaling voyage ''for the advantage of the 

 merchants and the good of the commonwealth.'' At the end 

 of the season, by sad mischance, eight of them were left in the 

 Arctic when the fleet sailed for home. 



It happened this way. When the ship lay becalmed off the 

 "Maiden's Papps," a famous hunting gi'ound for deer, the eight 

 — a gunner, a gunner's mate, two seamen, a ''whale-cutter," a 

 cooper, and two landsmen — were sent in a shallop with two 

 dogs, a snap-lance (an old form of gun), two lances, and a tin- 



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