"MINNESOTA" AND OTHER UNFORTUNATES 253 



shore, tried him, and condemned him to be hanged on the fourth 

 day following. 



''He is a young man about 24 years of age," the mate of the 

 Cortez wrote in the log, ''and has been in several ships since he 

 left America, which is 7 years. He belongs in Boston. His 

 parents now live in Worcester, Mass. They don't know where 

 their son is!" 



Weak, desperate William Bonzy! It would be easy to con- 

 sider his futile thrust at fate as of disproportionate importance. 

 Yet it was, after all, like Captain Clothier Peirce's melancholy, 

 merely an extreme example of what happened in one voyage or 

 another of virtually every whaling vessel, for nearly every log 

 book tells its story of mutiny and desertions. In other words, 

 William Bonzy, after seven years at sea, lost what few wits he 

 had, addled the small mind that God had given him, and, rather 

 than go back to his vessel, in his fear committed cowardly 

 murder. 



In addition to the particular temptations to misuse the boys 

 who went whaling, and the long confinement incidental to a 

 whaling voyage, consider the peculiar characteristics of the 

 industry as a whole, that made the whaleman an object of 

 contempt to sailors in the naval and merchant services. There 

 was little incentive to master the finer knowledge of the art of 

 seamanship, for the whaler, in contrast to the merchantman, 

 spent much time loafing up and down the whaling grounds and 

 watching the sea, as he cruised, lest a single distant spout 

 escape him, instead of cracking on all the sail his ship would 

 carry and studying every lift and shiver of canvas to make her 

 give the most speed of which she was capable. Then, too, in a 

 whaler, which carried proportionately a large crew to be able 

 to man her boats and take care of her blubber, there was less 

 work for each man, which meant less attention to the arts and 

 crafts of sailoring. 



Naturally, many of the men who manned the whaling fleets 

 in the later days of the golden age of whaling were of less 

 sailorly calibre than the merchant seamen and the man-of-war's 

 men. Since whaling was generally regarded by seamen in 



