240 A TYPICAL WHALEMAN. 



He received one hundred dollars and a suit of clothes 

 for four and a half years' work and in a few weeks he 

 sailed again, this time as boatsteerer on the Balaena. He 

 was gone nearly four years, adding to the store of novel 

 experiences which filled his life. While cruising down 

 the line one day, his vessel picked up a canoe containing 

 eight persons, Kanakas, who turned out to be the royal 

 family of Ascension. There had been a revolution and 

 the king and queen and princes had been cast adrift lit- 

 erally as well as practically. The Kanakas did these 

 things a century ago, more humanely than the enlightened 

 nations of the earth, exampli gratia, Servia now rid them- 

 selves of their rulers. One of the princes had a wound 

 in his shoulder where a shark had seized him when he 

 jumped overboard to capture it for food. 



The ship took eighteen hundred barrels of sperm this 

 voyage, and when the captain reached home he married. 

 Two months later he was at sea again as mate of the 

 Balaena. On the Peru grounds small pox broke out on 

 board the ship, and several of the crew died. Robbins had 

 a light attack of the disease, and finally left the ship at 

 Payta and reached home after a year and a half to greet 

 his wife and sail again in a few weeks as mate of the bark 

 Hope. To the Indian Ocean he sailed this time and was 

 gone two years and a half. Arriving home in May, 1850, 

 he sailed four or five months later as master of the same 

 vessel. He was gone thirty months on this voyage. His 

 next voyage as master of the bark Elisha Dunbar, was a 

 broken one, and he returned ill, but sailed again in the 

 Clara Bell and added thirty mon+hs more to his life on 

 the ocean wave. 



In 1859 Captain Robbins sailed in command of the bark 

 Thomas Pope on a four years' voyage, and this time he 



