322 WHALING 



some innocent escapade, by such an exhorter as, in the coloured 

 print on the wall above, had already reduced most of his hearers 

 to emotional despair; how natural and how simple for him to run 

 away to sea in a whaler! 



To follow the sequence marked out for us by the arrangement 

 of rooms in the museum, we shall have to suppose that this 

 youth of our imagination did some imagining on his own ac- 

 count. Perhaps he listened to sailors' yarns — what New Bed- 

 ford boy didn't? At any rate, he must have anticipated stop- 

 ping in distant and semi-savage islands, for we see the crude 

 whaling "irons" of wood and bone that the Esquimaux used; 

 the elaborate, if somewhat limited, full-dress costumes of feath- 

 ers, shells, and grasses that their chiefs wore. In one case we 

 see even themselves: the Malays as they lived and whaled. 



As we go on, '^ following the black arrow" according to in- 

 structions, we see above us small models of whales — sperm, 

 right, and killer — and on the walls beside us an amazing col- 

 lection of whale-craft: irons, lances, spades, boarding-knives, 

 mincing knives, craft of every description. 



But we have been saving the best for the last, as the museum 

 does. The big room now before you is nearly filled with it: a 

 model, half size throughout, of Jonathan Bourne's famous barque 

 Lagoda, complete in every detail. Her sails are furled on the 

 yards; her anchors, of course, are inboard; her whaleboats, all 

 their whale-craft in place in each one, hang from their big white 

 davits; her try- works are amidships; all the things we look for, 

 you and I, are there and the hundreds of things besides that no 

 one but a whaleman would know about. Nor is it all above 

 decks. You may go down the companionway for yourself to 

 the cabin; there, too, nothing is wanting. The captain's com- 

 fortable quarters, the chart room, the cabin storeroom; and 

 all made to scale, quite as if the Lagoda were ready to put to 

 sea to-morrow, lacking only her stores and her half-sized men. 



Other museums have scrimshaws and old-time furniture, a 

 few (particularly the Peabody Museum in Salem) have whale- 

 craft, though of course not in any such quantity or variety as 

 here. Several museums of natural history show whales — 



