236 WHALING 



board, who signed the articles when they were outside the 

 three-mile limit, and after cruising for a time off New Zealand, 

 he touched at Ascension Island, where he found four whalers 

 lying — the Edward Gary and Hector, ships; and the Pearl and 

 Harvest, barques. The four whalers he destroyed, and to the 

 master of one of them, George 0. Baker of the Edward Gary, 

 he offered a commission in the Confederate Navy, which Cap- 

 tain Baker refused, and was accordingly clapped into double 

 irons. 



From Ascension Island, after a stay of two weeks, Waddell 

 sailed north to the Japan Sea and thence, after unsuccessfully 

 cruising a few days, to the Okhotsk Sea, where he captured and 

 burned the whaling barque Ahigail. In the Okhotsk Sea there 

 was heavy floe ice, and the Ahigail, with her thirty barrels of 

 sperm oil, was the only prize; but in Captain Ebenezer F. Nye of 

 the Ahigail, Waddell caught, in one sense, if not in exactly the 

 usual sense, a lively and redoubtable old tartar. There is more 

 to be said soon of Captain Ebenezer Nye. 



On June 21st, Captain Waddell took the Shenandoah into the 

 Bering Sea. The day introduced one of the two most dis- 

 astrous weeks in the history of American whaling. 



In that week not a day passed but the Shenandoah captured 

 at least one whaler; on June 28th she captured eleven. During 

 the week she captured, in all, twenty-five, and burned all ex- 

 cept three or four that she placed under heavy bonds to carry 

 her prisoners to port. 



The pitiful futility of it! With Lee's surrender at Appoma- 

 mattox on April 9th, more than two months earlier, the Con- 

 federacy had fallen. Yet in distant seas, at first not knowing, 

 then not believing, the Shenandoah destroyed ship after ship, 

 and cargo after cargo of oil. 



The master of the Milo, one of five vessels taken on June 

 22d, asserted that the war was over, but he had no document 

 or paper to prove it, and Waddell, naturally refusing to accept 

 his word for it, placed the Milo under bonds for $46,000 to be 

 paid not later than six months after the United States ac- 

 knowledged the independence of the Confederate States and 



