242 TEE CRUISE OF THE " CACHALOT.'* 



could but forbear to persuade liim, sympathizing with 

 him too deeply to wish him away from such joys as ho 

 described to me. 



So we bade farewell to the line grounds, and 

 commenced another stretch to the south, another mile- 

 stone, as it were, on the long road home. Prosaic and 

 uneventful to the last degree was our passage, the 

 only incident worth recording being our "gamming" 

 of the Passamaqnoddy, of Martha's Vineyard, South Sea 

 whaler ; eighteen months out, with one thousand barrels 

 of sperm oil on board. We felt quite veterans along- 

 side of her crew, and our yarns laid over theirs to 

 such an extent that they were quite disgusted at their 

 lack of experience. Some of them had known our late 

 skipper, but none of them had a good word for him, the 

 old maxim, " Speak nothing but good of the dead," 

 being most flagrantly set at nought. One of her crew 

 was a Whitechapelian, who had been roving about the 

 world for a good many years. 



Amongst other experiences, he had, after "jumping 

 the bounty " two or three times, found himself a sergeant 

 in the Federal Army before Gettysburg. During that 

 most bloody battle, he informed me that a "Eeb" drew 

 a bead on him at about a dozen yards distance, and 

 fired. He said he felt just as if somebody had punched 

 him in the chest, and knocked him flat on his back on 

 top of a sharp stone — no pain at all, nor any' further 

 recollection of what had happened, until he found him- 

 self at the base, in hospital. "When the surgeons came 

 to examine him for the bullet, they found that it had 

 struck the broad brass plate of his cross-belt fairly in 

 the middle, penetrating it and shattering his breast 

 bone. But after torturing him vilely with the probe, 

 they were about to give up the search in despair, when 



