CHAPTER 101
The Decanter
Ere the English ship fades from sight be it set down here, that she hailed
from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby, merchant of
that city, the original of the famous whaling house of enderby and sons; a
house which in my poor whaleman’s opinion, comes not far behind the
united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point of real historical
interest. How long, prior to the year of our Lord 1775, this great whaling
house was in existence, my numerous fish-documents do not make plain;
but in that year (1775) it fitted out the first English ships that ever regularly
hunted the Sperm Whale; though for some score of years previous (ever
since 1726) our valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard
had in large fleets pursued the Leviathan, but only in the North and South
Atlantic: not elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers
were the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the great
Sperm Whale; and that for half a century they were the only people of the
whole globe who so harpooned him.
In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose, and at
the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape Horn, and
was the first among the nations to lower a whale-boat of any sort in the
great South Sea. The voyage was a skilful and lucky one; and returning to
her berth with her hold full of the precious sperm, the Amelia’s example
was soon followed by other ships, English and American, and thus the vast
Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were thrown open. But not content
with this good deed, the indefatigable house again bestirred itself: Samuel
and all his Sons—how many, their mother only knows—and under their
immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their expense, the British
government was induced to send the sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling
voyage of discovery into the South Sea.
Commanded by a naval Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage
of it, and did some service; how much does not appear. But this is not all. In
1819, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own, to go
on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That ship— well called
the “Syren”—made a noble experimental cruise; and it was thus that the
great Japanese Whaling Ground first became generally known. The Syren
in this famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer.
All honor to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to the
present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have
slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other world.
The ship named after him was worthy of the honor, being a very fast
sailer and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight
somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the
forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps—every soul
on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine gam I had—
long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his ivory heel— it
minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that ship; and may my
parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever lose sight of it. Flip?
Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it at the rate of ten gallons the
hour; and when the squall came (for it’s squally off there by Patagonia), and
all hands— visitors and all—were called to reef topsails, we were so top-
heavy that we had to swing each other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly
furled the skirts of our jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed
fast in the howling gale, a warning example to all drunken tars. However,
the masts did not go overboard; and by and by we scrambled down, so
sober, that we had to pass the flip again, though the savage salt spray
bursting down the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it
for my taste.
The beef was fine—tough, but with body in it. They said it was bullbeef;
others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for certain, how that
was. They had dumplings too; small, but substantial, symmetrically
globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you could feel them,
and roll them about in you after they were swallowed. If you stooped over
too far forward, you risked their pitching out of you like billiard-balls. The
bread— but that couldn’t be helped; besides, it was an anti-scorbutic, in
short, the bread contained the only fresh fare they had. But the forecastle
was not very light, and it was very easy to step over into a dark corner when
you ate it. But all in all, taking her from truck to helm, considering the
dimensions of the cook’s boilers, including his own live parchment boilers;
fore and aft, I say, the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship; of good fare and
plenty; fine flip and strong; crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to
hat-band.
But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other
English whalers I know of—not all though—were such famous, hospitable
ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread, and the can, and the joke;
and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking, and laughing? I will tell
you. The abounding good cheer of these English whalers is matter for
historical research. Nor have I been at all sparing of historical whale
research, when it has seemed needed.
The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders,
Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant in
the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions, touching plenty to
eat and drink.
For, as a general thing, the English merchant-ship scrimps her crew; but
not so the English whaler. Hence, in the English, this thing of whaling good
cheer is not normal and natural, but incidental and particular; and, therefore,
must have some special origin, which is here pointed out, and will be still
further elucidated.
During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an
ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew
must be about whalers. The title was, “Dan Coopman,” wherefore I
concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam
cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I was
reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production of one “Fitz
Swackhammer.” But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man, professor
of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and St. Potts,
to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box of sperm
candles for his trouble—this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the
book, assured me that “Dan Coopman” did not mean “The Cooper,” but
“The Merchant.” In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch book treated
of the commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained a very
interesting account of its whale fishery. And in this chapter it was, headed,
“Smeer,” or “Fat,” that I found a long detailed list of the outfits for the
larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from which list, as
translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following: 0084400,000 lbs. of
beef.
60,000 lbs. Friesland pork.
150,000 lbs. of stock fish.
550,000 lbs. of biscuit.
72,000 lbs. of soft bread.
2,800 firkins of butter.
20,000 lbs. of Texel and Leyden cheese.
144,000 lbs. cheese (probably an inferior article).
550 ankers of Geneva.
10,800 barrels of beer.
Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in the
present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes,
barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer.
At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this beer,
beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were incidentally
suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic application; and,
furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my own, touching the
probable quantity of stock-fish, &c., consumed by every Low Dutch
harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen whale fishery. In the
first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and Leyden cheese consumed,
seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their naturally unctuous natures,
being rendered still more unctuous by the nature of their vocation, and
especially by their pursuing their game in those frigid Polar Seas, on the
very coasts of that Esquimaux country where the convivial natives pledge
each other in bumpers of train oil.
The quantity of the beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those
polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that climate,
so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen, including the
short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed three
months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we
have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say, we have precisely
two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks’ allowance, exclusive of his
fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin. Now, whether these gin and beer
harpooneers, so fuddled as one might fancy them to have been, were the
right sort of men to stand up in a boat’s head, and take good aim at flying
whales; this would seem somewhat improbable. Yet they did aim at them,
and hit them too. But this was very far North, be it remembered, where beer
agrees well with the constitution; upon the Equator, in our southern fishery,
beer would be apt to make the harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and
boozy in his boat; and grievous loss might ensue to Nantucket and New
Bedford.
But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers of
two or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English whalers
have not neglected so excellent an example. For, say they, when cruising in
an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good
dinner out of it, at least. And this empties the decanter.
