LIFE ON BOARD AND OFF 201 



in his right mind, did a fowl find its way to the forecastle 

 mess. 



The men forward, though, had certain epicurean joys that the 

 owners never paid for and that the log book never noted. The 

 cook, if a good fellow and proficient in his business, sometimes 

 managed to fry doughnuts of a sort in the try-pots while the 

 crew was ''boihng" oil; and the men themselves had a trick of 

 dipping ship's bread in a bucket of salt water and frying it in 

 the same great kettles. The under lip of a bowhead is said, if 

 properly cooked, to have resembled beef, and Melville has im- 

 mortalized steaks from the hump. I have heard, too, that 

 barnacles from the back of the whale were an excellent shellfish, 

 judged by men heartily tired of salt meat. There are, as every 

 one is aware, many things in the philosophy of the sea that are 

 unknown to philosophers — and epicures — ashore. 



The logs picture another side of whaling, too. In the daily 

 entries are often to be heard the whistle of cat and rope's end 

 and the clank of irons. On December 11, 1830, on board the 

 ship Winslow in the South Atlantic, ''J. Butler & J. Hammett 

 was seized together flogged for fighting Lat 95, 15, Long by 

 Chronometer, 56, 59 West." On March 19, 1878, Captain 

 Sylvanus D. Robinson of the Bartholomew Gosnold, barque, who 

 seems to have been a milder, more ingenious skipper, ''kept a 

 thief on deck working all day wearing a piece of canvas on his 

 back marked 'Thief and Liar.' " Just when a well-earned flog- 

 ging was carried to the point where it became inhuman cruelty, 

 the log books, for obvious reasons, never tell; but entries now 

 and then state the bare fact that on such a day the captain or 

 mate killed a man, and the reader can add the details to suit his 

 own taste. The chances are that for one entry or another — 

 this is not true of all — imagination cannot surpass the truth. 



So up and down the seas they cruised, those old brigs and 

 barques and ships. Now, like Captain Fish of the whaleship 

 Montreal, who touched at the island of Terceira in 1850, they 

 would bring off a hundred bushels of potatoes, more or less, and 

 "several of the aristocracy of the island" as their guests. 

 Again, cruising among islands where objects that had little 



