WILLIAM SCORESBY, THE YOUNGER. 
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liad been emploj^ed as whalers for more than thirty years, and when 
William Scoresby began, about twenty vessels were annually des- 
patched from tliat port in quest of whales. He, himself, made his 
first expedition in the ship Henrietta," which started for Greenland 
in 1785. It was not till 1791 that he was appointed to the command 
of a ship, and he is known to have complained of having married 
before he was well able to support a wife. One can scarcely be aston- 
islied at tliis, if, as liis son writes in liis autobiography, during the 
six years which preceded his father's appointment to the command 
of a vessel in 1791, his receipts for the whole of the voj^ages were 
only sixty pounds. 
On the oth October, 1789, our William Scoresby was born. 
Physically and mentally he appears to have been of a timid and 
delicate constitution. His mother was a singularly pious woman, 
and the impression of her kindty life and teaching was very lasting 
on the mind of her son. T\m comes out very clearly in his manu- 
script autobiography, e.specially in the wonderful veneration with 
which he regarded Sunday. Once, he tells us, he found on that 
sacred day a penknife with six blades, perfectly new ; he picked it up 
and carried it about, conscience-stricken, for a week, at the end of 
which time he threw it into the river near the place where it was found. 
The lessons of his sclioolniaster were of a different order, and 
enforced in a different way. The cane and the ferule, both of which 
are stated to have been of unusual magnitude, were constantly applied, 
and Scoresby and his companions were frequently locked in the school 
through hours of darkness, or strapped to a bench, or with a cord 
fastened to their thumbs and fixed to a pulley, hoisted up so as to 
leave their toes alone upon the ground, a class of punishment in 
which modern schoolmasters would scarcely dare to indulge. 
When the boy was ten years old, his father, who had resigned 
his command of the "Henrietta," undertook the charge of a ship 
sailing from the Tliames, the "Dundee," of London. He called in 
Whitby Roads in 1800, to take leave of his wife and family, who 
resided at Whitby. William went at his father s invitation to see 
the ship, and contrived so to manage circumstances that instead of 
returning to his mother and his family, his father took him along to 
s 
