Chapter 103.00: CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.

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CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.
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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 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 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 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:

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. 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, 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.