His CAPTORS. 63 



A Whale-ship in its Glory. Present yield of Oil. 



The decks present that lively, though dirty 

 spectacle which whalemen love, their faces all 

 begrimed and sooty, and smeared with oil, so 

 that you can not tell if they be black or white. 

 A farmer's golden harvest in autumn is not a 

 pleasanter sight to him, than it is to a whaler 

 to have his decks and blubber-room " blubber- 

 log," the try- works a-blazing, cooper a-pound- 

 ing, oil a-flowing, every body busy and dirty 

 night and day. Donkey-loads of Chilian or Pe- 

 ruvian gold, filing into the custom-house at 

 Valparaiso and Lima, or a stream of Benton's 

 yellow-boys flowing up the Mississippi, or bags 

 of the Californian dust riding into San Fran- 

 cisco, have no such charms for him as cutting- 

 in a hundred-barrel whale and turning out oil 

 by the hogshead. 



The whale now taken proves to be a cow 

 whale, forty-five feet long and twenty-five round, 

 and it will yield between seventy and eighty 

 barrels of right whale oil. This is about the 

 ordinary size of the New Zealand whale, a mere 

 dwarf in comparison with that of the northwest, 

 which sometimes yields, it is said, three hundred 

 barrels, ordinarily one hundred and fifty, or one 

 hundred and eighty. 



