13 



Chapter 



THE WHALERS 



T 



J. HE whale is the largest animal in the world and hunting 

 the whale has been one o£ the largest and grimmest of human enter- 

 prises. It has been said that war consisted of long periods of dreary 

 boredom punctuated by some hours of intense activity and heart- 

 breaking fear. The same statement would apply to whaling. The men 

 who manned the whaling vessels spent weeks, months and years in 

 heavy work, slow sailing and dreary waiting. People often assume 

 that the curse of whaling was the danger and the loss of life involved. 

 The study of whaling logs makes it clear that the whalemen them- 

 selves accepted the hard work, the danger, the dirt, but what chiefly 

 wore down their spirit was the long waiting and the boredom. 



The danger was one of the compensations. It was the challenge 

 and the excitement that held men to the chase, year after year. Of 

 compensation, in terms of money, the whalemen saw very little. The 

 whaling ships created prosperity for hundreds of ports on both sides 

 of the Atlantic. They made fortunes for the owners and the operators, 

 for the merchants and the shipyards and for a few captains, but very 

 little of the money trickled down to the mates and the boat steerers 

 and the crew. What little came their way easily slipped through the 

 greasy fingers of the men who fought the whale and reduced him 

 to so many tons of bone and barrels of oil. 



Whaling was hunting on a grand scale and even men who are poor 

 and ragged and battered by fortune may have courage and imagina- 



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