6 BEACH-LA-MAR. 
must ever irk the whaleman; he must keep the sea as long as he may; 
the haven where other ships would be is to him but the place in which 
to refit with wood and water to equip him for another campaign 
against the gigantic mammals of fathomless ocean. His contact with 
the shoreward folk must besobrief asto leave little permanent record. 
Thus it is in the Beach-la-mar; only a few expressions or words do I 
find it at all necessary to accredit to whalers’ influence, and those in 
no more than a secondary position. 
Whaling, it should be explained, now that the industry is all 
but extinct, was conducted in a fashion different from merchant 
seafaring; it paid the whalemen on a basis of sharing in the catch. 
The unit was the lay. Each sailor, according to his rating on the 
ship’s articles, was entitled to a lay representing a fixed large or 
small share in the avails of the catch. Accordingly it was the best 
economy to send the vessel out from her home port with only so 
many men as would serve to work her around the stormy capes past 
which were the whaling-grounds. Arrived in the Pacific it was the 
custom to recruit boat’s crews from the islanders, engaged for a wage 
ridiculously small and without reward from the catch. From these 
islanders, thus thrown for months into intimacy with the sailors, 
Polynesian words were acquired to facilitate intercourse, and the 
islanders themselves picked up some slight familiarity with broken 
English interrupted by such Polynesian words as the sailors had 
thought it easy or amusing to acquire. Discharged somewhere at 
the end of the whaling voyage these men, now become competent 
seamen and somewhat proficient interpreters, engaged for new 
voyages, either through their enjoyment of the life or in the hope that 
at some haphazard time they might reach their homes. It is to their 
influence that we may best ascribe the presence of Polynesian words 
readily recognizable as such in the Beach-la-mar, a speech designed 
to facilitate communication with Melanesian peoples to whom the 
Samoan and the Hawaiian are as foreign and incomprehensible as is 
the English. For we should note that there never was a permanent 
jargon based upon English and Polynesian.* ‘Thus in the vocabulary 
we note such words as katkaz and kanaka, in which the whalemen’s 
influence has been carried far. 

*Frederici, however, takes another view, but he advances no argument in support of 
his statement (page 93). 
Von Neu-Seeland im Siidwesten und Hawaii im Nordosten scheint tiberhaupt das 
Siidsee-Pidgin-Englisch seine Laufe tiber die Inseln begonnen zu haben. * * In 
der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts scheint eine Art Pidgin-Englisch die Verkehrssprache 
zwischen Weissen und Eingebornen auf allen damals besuchten Inseln der Stidhalfte des 
Grossen Ozeans gewesen zu sein. Wahrend dann aber dieser Jargon in Ostpolynesien 
durch Franzoésisch, auf den Cook-Inseln und Neu-Seeland durch ein leidlich reines 
Englisch und im tibrigen allgemein durch die von den Weissen erlernten Eingebornen- 
Dialekte der polynesischen Inseln zuriickgedrangt wurde, gewann in ganz Melanesien, 
mit ausnahme von West-Neuguinea, das Pidgin-Englisch durch den Arbeiterhandel ganz 
gewaltig an Ausdehnung und Intensitat. 
