His CAPTORS. 99 



Various Resorts of the Whale. Successful Seasons. 



Tristan d'Acunha ; in the Southern Ocean, 

 south of the Cape of Good Hope, there are the 

 uninhabited Crozettes Islands, St. Paul's, and 

 other parts of the Indian Ocean ; in the Pacific 

 Ocean, there are the New Zealand cruising 

 ground, the New Holland, Chili, and the North- 

 west, from the coast of America clear over to 

 Kamtschatka. 



This last is now the great harvest-field of 

 American whalers from May to October ; and 

 it will be likely to last longer than any other, 

 because they are prohibited by the Russians 

 from bay whaling, which destroys the cows 

 about the time of calving. Almost all ships 

 fill up there. Some have even thrown over- 

 board provisions to make way for oil. The 

 havoc they make of whales is immense. There 

 are ships that took, during the last season, 

 twenty-five to even thirty-three hundred bar- 

 rels in a few months. I have heard of one 

 ship that sunk twenty-six whales after she had 

 killed them ; of another that killed nine before 

 she saved one ; of another that killed six in 

 one day, and all of them sunk ; of another that 

 had three boats stove and all the men pitched 

 into the sea, without any one's being lost. This 



