''MINNESOTA" AND OTHER UNFORTUNATES 255 



coming to anchor; so we went up to them, to see what was the 

 matter. One of them, a stout, hearty-looking fellow, held out 

 his leg and said he had the scurvy; another had cut his hand; 

 and others had got nearly well, but said that there were plenty 

 aloft to furl the sails, so they were sogering on the fore- 

 castle. There was only one 'splicer' on board, a fine-looking 

 old tar, who was in the bunt of the fore topsail. He was 

 probably the only thorough marline-spike seaman in the ship, 

 before the mast. The mates, of course, and the boat-steerers, 

 and also two or three of the crew, had been to sea before, but 

 only on whaling voyages; and the greater part of the crew were 

 raw hands, just from the bush, and had not yet got the hay-seed 

 out of their hair. The mizzen topsail hung in the buntlines till 

 everything was furled forward. Thus a crew of thirty men were 

 half an hour in doing what would have been done in the Alert, 

 with eighteen hands to go aloft, in fifteen or twenty minutes." 

 It can be little cause for wonder that boys and men of minds 

 a bit unsound by nature broke under the conditions of the 

 long whaling voyages. Nor was Clothier Peirce the only victim 

 of melancholia whom I have discovered aft. Here is a passage 

 from the log book of the ship Morea, Captain Thomas Pea- 

 body, which sailed from New Bedford in 1853, for a voyage of 

 four years in the Pacific Ocean: 



REMARKS Saturday June 3rd 185U 

 Strong winds from W. S. W. and some fog the first part ship 

 head S. E. saw 5 ships this afternoon Captain Peabody retired 

 for a while and on being called and at the tea table he made some 

 very unuseual remarks for him to make askin the officers if they 

 thought a man would be punished in the other world for makeing 

 away with himself if he had nothing to hope for or could see no 

 prospect of happiness before him at night he went to bed as 

 useual and was up during the night givein directions how to 

 stear at breakfast he seemed rather meloncolly eat but little 

 after breakfast came on deck but soon went below again At 

 10 A. M. he sent the steward after mee to come below I went 

 into the cabbin hee was in his bearth hee told mee hee had sent 



