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 & 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:
400,000 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 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 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.