LIFE ON BOARD AND OFF 199 



sail, eighteen men looking after Caroline Francis Macomber." 

 As I read the entry in that log book of sixty years ago, I wonder 

 what in later life befell little Caroline Frances Macomber; I 

 wonder where she is living now, if living she is. When she was 

 lost on Albemarle Island eighteen men spent the night hunting 

 for her and on " Tuesday, July 22, '62 . . . . At nine o'clock 

 A. M. found the little girl.'' 



The women who went whaling with their men saw strange 

 lands and strange sights, and took part in strange adventures 

 not a few, as many a woman lives, this day, to tell. Lives began 

 and ended in some of those old whalers. On board the barque 

 Ohio — ''the little Ohio'' she was called — the captain's wife bore 

 a daughter in February, '59. They named her Lark. In 

 January, '61, off the Galapagos Islands, little Lark Baker died 

 on board the same vessel. Ship's bread and salt beef were no 

 food for weaning a child. They made a coffin and buried her on 

 the shore of Charles Island at Post Office Bay. (It was only a 

 mail box on a pole that gave the place its name, but there the 

 whalers left their letters, either for other whalers or for home, 

 and now and then one reached its destination.) In the log of 

 the Roscoe, barque, for February 2, 1860, there is a blank page. 

 On that day Captain William H. Almy and seven men, one of 

 them the captain's own son George, were killed. And the 

 captain's wife and daughter were on board the vessel when it 

 happened! 



The old whalemen lived in a world of tales so strange that 

 pure romance has scarcely surpassed them. There was a girl 

 named Ann Johnson who shipped as a sailor, under the name of 

 George Johnson, in the whaler Christopher Mitchel; her sex 

 discovered, they sent her home from Paita as a passenger in the 

 ship Nantucket. Not a few crews set their vessels on fire — the 

 ship Canton Packet and the barque Globe are cases in point — and 

 the old log books tell of ships saved by scuttling. There are 

 terse entries that tell of murder. There are strange old chroni- 

 cles of barratry. On board the Golconda in '30 a mutiny came 

 to an inglorious end when the officers, assisted by the cooper, 

 *'put four men in casks and headed them up." George Shuman 



