252 WHALING 



"refuse duty" on the voyage home, thus forfeiting their lays 

 and very hkely going to jail, besides. 



True, there is another side of the whaleman's life that is too 

 often neglected. Though existence in a whaler was likely to 

 be hell on earth, yet once out of his ship and safe ashore, the 

 old-time whaleman shook off his troubles and danced a fling with 

 no troublesome thought of who was to pay the piper. In 

 monkey jacket and red shirt and tarpaulin, he spent with a free 

 hand his every penny. He burst riotously into theatre, rum 

 shop, and tavern; he hired a gig and drove hell-bent-for- 

 election through the streets; he ogled the girls, he swapped 

 jokes with the boys, he drank with all comers, and went on 

 board as drunk as a lord and as proud as a king, ready all 

 over again to buy with months of misery at sea a few golden, 

 pagan hours of paradise ashore. And months of misery they 

 were. 



Some men, too strong to be broken down, but driven to des- 

 perate measures, took the law into their own hands, as the true 

 stories of many mutinies testify; some, pathetically weak, 

 turned in despair like rats in a corner. At Toomaholooah, one 

 of the Navigation Islands, a young man named William Bonzy 

 ran away from a New York barque, one night in 1844, and in the 

 morning fell into the hands of a couple of natives who gleefully 

 snatched at the opportunity to earn a reward of five or ten 

 dollars by returning him to his vessel. As the youth was walk- 

 ing along quietly enough between the two, he suddenly drew a 

 dirk and, stabbing one of them, who happened to be the chief of 

 the tribe, killed him instantly. 



Before the other native could act, the runaway sailor plunged 

 into the water and swam out to where two boats from the dis- 

 tant whaleship Cortez, Captain John W. Hammond, had come 

 inshore to trade. 



The boats carried young William Bonzey to the Cortez, but 

 the New York barque learned of it and sent a boat thither to 

 fetch him back to his own vessel, whence at six o'clock the next 

 morning — the natives having meanwhile detained as hostage a 

 boat and one of the crew from the barque — they took him on 



