198 WHALING 



bed bugs." Affairs evidently had reached a point that broke 

 down the captain's endurance. 



There were captains gallant and captains sad. On board the 

 Hihernia, ship, whose log contains the ecstatic entry for a day 

 in February, "glory of glories got 8 whales," it is noted that a 

 chained man threatened to strike the captain; when, two months 

 later, the brewing trouble broke in mutiny, the captain went at 

 his men with a sword. Alas, they were too many for their 

 valiant skipper and forced him to abandon the voyage and take 

 them home! In the frank record that the captain of the ship 

 Huntress in 1845 set the cooper's broken leg "eze well eze he 

 could" there is a singularly vivid glimpse of the painful rough- 

 and-ready surgery that the old whaling captains, no matter how 

 kind their hearts, were forced to administer. Of another master 

 whaleman the mate wrote with clumsy humour, ''All right except 

 the capt. who is onwell & has been ever since we left home. 

 What the matter is I cannot tell without he is lovesick for some 

 of them South Dartmouth ladies." 



Of such humour there are many examples to season those dry 

 and formal records, which cling, for the most part, so closely to 

 their conventional form that they nearly succeed in hiding for 

 ever the drama that lies behind their terse notes. It was a 

 wild moment that is chronicled in the pleasing statement, 

 ''Whale eat up 1 boat & stove another." And the accumulated 

 exasperation of an irreligious mate of the barque Elizabeth 

 found expression on an October Sunday in 1845, in the entry, 

 "Whales in sight, but of no use to us, the capt. being saintish 

 today." What a picture of boyish triumph the log of the 

 barque Coral gives in an entry of '67, which tells of taking a 

 cow and her calf — " the cabin boy struck the calf and done well." 

 There was a lad on his way to becoming a boat-steerer and, 

 some day, a captain! There is kindly humour, too, in the final 

 sentence of a clumsy entry in the log of the barque Roscoe, 

 George H. Macomber, for July 22, 1862: "Two boats crews on 

 shore getting terrapin. At 3 P. M. the Capt & his wife & two 

 daughters, also capt. lost his oldest daughter at 7 P. M. one 

 boat came on board to get lanterns and old canvas and one old 



