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- This Canadian trip proved highly successful. Selling his glittering
goods at a great advance, he received in exchange valuable peltries and
furs at a corresponding reduction. Returning to Charlestown, he
disposed of his return cargo again at a very fine profit. And now, with
a light heart and a heavy purse, he resolved to visit his sweetheart
and parents, of whom, for three years, he had had no tidings.
They were not less astonished than delighted at his reappearance; he
had been numbered with the dead. But his love still seemed strangely
coy; willing, but yet somehow mysteriously withheld. The old intrigues
were still on foot. Israel soon discovered, that though rejoiced to
welcome the return of the prodigal son—so some called him—his father
still remained inflexibly determined against the match, and still
inexplicably countermined his wooing. With a dolorous heart he mildly
yielded to what seemed his fatality; and more intrepid in facing peril
for himself, than in endangering others by maintaining his rights (for
he was now one-and-twenty), resolved once more to retreat, and quit his
blue hills for the bluer billows.
A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded
misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous
distressed. The ocean brims with natural griefs and tragedies; and into
that watery immensity of terror, man’s private grief is lost like a
drop.
Travelling on foot to Providence, Rhode Island, Israel shipped on board
a sloop, bound with lime to the West Indies. On the tenth day out, the
vessel caught fire, from water communicating with the lime. It was
impossible to extinguish the flames. The boat was hoisted out, but
owing to long exposure to the sun, it needed continual bailing to keep
it afloat. They had only time to put in a firkin of butter and a
ten-gallon keg of water. Eight in number, the crew entrusted themselves
to the waves, in a leaky tub, many leagues from land. As the boat swept
under the burning bowsprit, Israel caught at a fragment of the
flying-jib, which sail had fallen down the stay, owing to the charring,
nigh the deck, of the rope which hoisted it. Tanned with the smoke, and
its edge blackened with the fire, this bit of canvass helped them
bravely on their way. Thanks to kind Providence, on the second day they
were picked up by a Dutch ship, bound from Eustatia to Holland. The
castaways were humanely received, and supplied with every necessary. At
the end of a week, while unsophisticated Israel was sitting in the
maintop, thinking what should befall him in Holland, and wondering what
sort of unsettled, wild country it was, and whether there was any
deer-shooting or beaver-trapping there, lo! an American brig, bound
from Piscataqua to Antigua, comes in sight. The American took them
aboard, and conveyed them safely to her port. There Israel shipped for
Porto Rico; from thence, sailed to Eustatia.
Other rovings ensued; until at last, entering on board a Nantucket
ship, he hunted the leviathan off the Western Islands and on the coast
of Africa, for sixteen months; returning at length to Nantucket with a
brimming hold. From that island he sailed again on another whaling
voyage, extending, this time, into the great South Sea. There, promoted
to be harpooner, Israel, whose eye and arm had been so improved by
practice with his gun in the wilderness, now further intensified his
aim, by darting the whale-lance; still, unwittingly, preparing himself
for the Bunker Hill rifle.
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