THE AMERICAN WHALEMAN. 59 



her bottom, causing us to lose about two or three knots' 

 headway. We got pretty well up with the cape, when a 

 south-east gale struck us and headed us off. We battered 

 against it for eight days, when we found ourselves in 68 S., 

 and about 130 W. Here we came in sight of the great ice- 

 barrier, extending far as the eye could reach, plumb up and 

 down, two hundred feet or more. This was the great shin- 

 ing wall, beyond which, we are told by the scientists of a 

 couple of hundred years ago, lies the great open sea of the 

 Antarctic, where dwell nations of mermen and maids ; kra- 

 kens, with ' amethyst and golden antenna?, of power and 

 scope to entangle and draw down great ships ; and sea-ser- 

 pents of hideous mien, and fathoms in length ;' where, in a 

 wondrous palace of ice, dwells the southern ice-king, who 

 drives the frost-fiends to labor on icebergs, and store treas- 

 ures of the hail and snow; where the marmicle and mar- 

 mate gambol in fields of the giant kelp, and herd the count- 

 less shoals of mackerel and herring ; where the ivory-tooth- 

 ed walrus and the shag- man ed sea -lion keep guard over 

 the nests of the uniformed penguin and the albatross: a 

 sea, in whose calm waters the wounded whale finds sanctu- 

 ary against the pursuit of the hunters of the open ocean. 

 Here the worried whales find peace, and grow in blubber on 

 the crimson carpets of medusa?. There are no threshers 

 there to club the old backs; no sword or saw fish to stab 

 and scarify ; no Nimrods to harpoon and lance, to mangle, 

 tear, and boil. Above this sea a six months' sun has four 

 or five counterfeits, and paints the leaden sky with rings, 

 and crosses, and crescents of colored fires; and the six 

 months' night is illumined by the coruscations of the aurora 

 borealis. 



"In the centre of this sea is a circular marble throne, 

 whose base has three hundred and sixty divisions, from 

 which meridian lines run out and span the great world; 



