250 WHALING 



Kicked me as I lay on Deck as I am informed be the crew & 

 Hall & Edward Macomber saw him do it when I came too: I 

 found Myself in the Cabin How I came their I cannot tell it 

 was about 50 Minutes after he Struck me before I knew what 

 had Happened to me & then others told me after knocking me 

 down, He went to Masthead, Fore ward" 



A one-legged outfitter named Bennet had Captain Peirce ar- 

 rested at Hobart, Tasmania, a month before he sailed for home. 

 And during his return voyage he sprung his main yard, carried 

 away his jibboom and all his head gear, and, calamity of calami- 

 ties! shipped a sea that stove his pigpen. 



Now the log of the Minnesota, as I have indicated, is a re- 

 markable document and quite out of the common. Captain 

 Clothier Peirce was unquestionably an arrant eccentric. His 

 delusions and obsessions manifestly made more tense the nervous 

 friction of the long voyage. But the very things in the log 

 book that are most grotesque, are nevertheless but extreme 

 examples of things that were typical of old whaling voyages and 

 that came, sometimes, to ends more tragic by far than the 

 ludicrous mouthings of a scatter- witted captain. 



Consider just what a whaling voyage in the middle of the last 

 century meant to officers and crew. A band of men bound by 

 no ties of blood, friendship, or kindred pleasures — some of them 

 persuaded (and some of them ''shanghaied") into a life of which 

 they knew nothing at all, by promises which, regardless of the 

 wishes or intentions of the captain, it was utterly impossible 

 to fulfil — confined for four years, except for laborious hours on 

 the open sea and rare, brief intervals of liberty on shore, to a 

 space no larger than an ordinary house. 



To maintain discipline the captain, to all practical purposes 

 the absolute ruler of his little dominion, exercised sharp dis- 

 crimination between the men forward and the officers aft. He 

 might, whenever he deemed the occasion sufficient, seize a man 

 to the rigging and flog his bare back with a rope's end. The 

 captain — or any other officer — could haze a man with extra work 

 or make his life miserable in any of numerous petty ways; 

 and, which is more, toward the end of a voyage it was profitable 



