142 THE WHALE HUNTERS 



Strip of ocean but at night the ship was brought to the wind 

 and the canvas that had not been furled was so arranged 

 that she remained stationary. For Thomas and his fellow 

 officers night was the time to sleep whilst a harpooner and 

 a few men kept watch on the poop-deck; for upon the 

 alertness and cool judgement of the mates depended the 

 conduct of the chase and the killing of the whales during 

 the hours of daylight. At every dawn the systematic 

 search of thousands of square miles was resumed and the 

 endless routine of cruising, sighting, chasing and killing 

 the whale, cutting and boiling, sleeping and eating, 

 coming on and going off watch was relieved only by an 

 occasional visit to an island and by any hobbies which 

 these men found to their liking. One of the whaleman's 

 favourite spare-time occupations was 'scrimshawing', 

 which was their term for carving into decorative shapes 

 the teeth of the sperm whale. 



Thomas's diary became his hobby. He described in 

 detail all the islands that the Meribah visited; he wrote of 

 the luxuriantly vegetated archipelago of the Fijis; of the 

 friendliness of the people of the Tonga Islands; of the 

 breath-taking loveliness of Honolulu in the Hawaii 

 islands where every March a huge fleet of whaleships 

 made their final preparations to spend the summer in 

 the colder waters of the Okhotsk Sea and the Bering 

 Straits which were now the only grounds in which the 

 bowhead had not been almost exterminated. He told the 

 story of how the Meribah repulsed an attack by fifty 

 canoes manned by the bloodthirsty natives of the Gilbert 

 Islands. For Thomas, as it had been for his ancestor 

 Jonathan, sea travel was a constant source of joy and not 

 of boredom as it was to Hodge the first mate. 



This rough-grained officer did not abandon his preju- 

 dice towards Thomas even when the lean and solemn- 

 faced Hamm sought to mend the breach between the two 

 men by assuring Hodge that Thomas was not making 



