Chapter CI: 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 0083 , this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous
fish-documents do not make plain; but in that year ( ) it fitted out
the first English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale;
though for some score of years previous (ever since ) our valiant
Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard had in large fleets
pursued that 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 , 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 0084 , 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 bye 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 to my
taste. The beef was fine --tough, but with body in it. They said it
was bull-beef; 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. Pott's, 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, etc., 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 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.