THE AMEBICAN WHALEMAN. 65 



the gale the more chippy is this little black butterfly of a 

 Mother Carey, and no. man's heart feels lost while he sees 

 the little specks finding a safe lee from the hurricane right 

 under the comb of the breaking rollers. You young 'uns 

 may laugh at me for soft, but I tell you when you get as old 

 as me you'll know a darned sight less than you do now. In 

 the worst gale I ever was in off Cape Horn, where the gales 

 are the worst of any place in this world, a great sea ran from 

 under the keel, and let the ship down so fast that you could 

 hardly keep with her, and you'd grab the rigging to keep 

 along. And when the ship struck the bottom of the trough 

 with a chuck that made her tremble as if she had an ague 

 fit, and the on-coming sea, high as the mainyard, was a-roU- 

 in' down us with a hissin' comb, and the dark wall of water 

 was so straight up that I thought it would breach thirty feet 

 over us — in the very worst of this a whole flock of Mother 

 Carey's chicl^ns came down, hovering close under the break- 

 ing white-cap, safe harbored from the blast. I thought of 

 the promise that as the sparrows are cared for so would we 

 be ; and whenever I saw these little bunches of black feath- 

 ers playin' safe in the hollow of the sea, I never could get up 

 much of a scare as to what would happen to me." Our men 

 all felt that bad fortune would attend the killing of one of 

 these little birds, and I found something of the same feeling 

 among the sailors of other ships. 



Among the yarns . of the cape, a favorite one with our 

 - crew was " the dismasting of the Ironsides under the lucky 

 Captain Folger." 



" He was always lucky," said Harry, " and never more 

 lucky than the night off Cape Horn when he lost every spar 

 to the stumps, ten fee{ above deck. I'll tell you how it was. 

 Ours was the luckiest ship that sailed from Nantucket, and 

 the captain was the luckiest man that ever trod shoe-leath- 

 er. He had made five voyages to »the Pacific ; come home 



