128 WHALING 



whalers had already rounded the Horn and thrust their bows 

 into unfamiliar seas, the sailing of any one whaling vessel was an 

 affair of little moment; the Glohe weighed anchor on December 

 15th with probably no more ceremony than attended the fare- 

 well of any other whaler. An accident to her crossjack-yard 

 while she was working out of port forced her to return; but, 

 having fitted and sent aloft another yard. Captain Worth 

 sailed again, four days later. It appears that, in spite of the 

 strong influence of superstition on seafaring men, no one re- 

 garded the accident as ominous, for, of all the men on the 

 crew hst, only one failed to sail in the Glohe, and he was ''taken 

 out of the within-named ship by order of law previous to his 

 leaving this port." He was luckier than he knew. 



Twenty men, nearly all of them natives of New England and 

 bearing good old Yankee names, sailed in the Glohe. Besides 

 the captain, whose age is not given in the crew list, the oldest 

 of them, Chief Mate William Beetle, was twenty-six, and of the 

 rest, who ranged down to fourteen, eight were seventeen or 

 younger. 



The brutality of life in a whaler has been, for more than a 

 hundred years, a commonplace; and the author of that quaint 

 old book, ''Evils and Abuses in the Naval and Merchant Serv- 

 ice Exposed," and other writers of an early time, exaggerate 

 little, if at all, when they say that it was a common practice 

 in whaling vessels so to abuse the men that they would run 

 away, or make a show of insubordination, whereby they would 

 forfeit their lays and help a thrifty captain to save money for 

 himself and the owners. It was entirely typical of the times 

 and the trade that, while the Glohe lay at Oahu in the Sand- 

 wich Islands, after an uneventful voyage, six men deserted and 

 one was discharged. 



To fill their places, the captain shipped four Americans — 

 Anthony Henson, Thomas Lilliston, Silas Payne, and a Negro 

 steward named William Humphries — an Englishman named 

 John Oliver, and a native of Oahu, who went by the name of 

 Joseph Brown. And the recruits were as vicious an aggregation 

 as the average sea captain could wish to be delivered from. 



