40 



WHALES AND WHALERS. [PART I. 



called, from its proprietor, Jackson's Bay. These 

 establishments have a number of boats in their 

 service, manned with white people and natives. 

 Sometimes other inhabitants of the beach have 

 boats of their own, and sell their oil to the 

 Europeans. The boat's crew are paid a certain sum, 

 either for each whale brought in, or for every tun 

 of oil, and they derive their chief profits from the 

 practice of paying their poorer associates with the 

 necessaries of life, slops, and articles of luxury, as 

 tobacco, and especially spirits. The whalers are 

 constrained to take these articles from their em- 

 ployers, who put their own prices upon them, which 

 are exorbitant. They take care never to allow 

 their dependents to get out of debt ; this they ac- 

 complish by profusely providing them with drink. 

 I do not, however, mean to assert that they are large 

 gainers in these transactions ; they have to do with 

 a reckless class of people, runaway sailors and for- 

 mer convicts from New South Wales, who do not 

 think much about leaving their employers in debt, 

 and go off, without giving much notice of their in- 

 tention, in some of the numerous vessels cruising 

 about the Sound and Cloudy Bay. 



The jealousy existing between the several em- 

 ployers, the system of decoying each other's men by 

 every means in their power, the character of the 

 population itself, the universal use of adulterated 

 and poisoned spirits, have created a state of society 

 in which it is only to be wondered that, in the ab- 



