LIFE ON BOARD AND OFF 207 



"And I says, 'Do you remember the man that was tied up to 

 the rigging off Cape Horn? Well, that man was me. ' 



"And she says, 'Hey?' 



"She was deef and had a kind of a machine in her ear to listen 

 with and I couldn't make her remember me; but I remembered 

 her, all right." 



But these are the merest hints of what was going on during 

 the two, three, or four years a whaleman spent at sea. The 

 thread of an incident, as it appears in a log book or in a sailor's 

 yam, is the slenderest imaginable; it is hard to trace at all, and 

 it is soon lost in spite of every effort to carry it further. Here 

 follows the complete true story of a boy who went whaling more 

 than threescore years ago. 



