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- 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 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.
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