One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters
and deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record
at home, however transient and immediately forgotten that record.
Do you suppose that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps
caught by the whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being
carried down to the bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan--
do you suppose that that poor fellow's name will appear in the newspaper
obituary you will read to-morrow at your breakfast? No: because the
mails are very irregular between here and New Guinea. In fact,
did you ever hear what might be called regular news direct or indirect
from New Guinea? Yet I will tell you that upon one particular voyage
which I made to the Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty
different ships, every one of which had had a death by a whale,
some of them more than one, and three that had each lost a boat's crew.
For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon
you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it.
Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea
that a whale is an enormous creature of enormous power;
but I have ever found that when narrating to them some specific
example of this two-fold enormousness, they have significantly
complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I declare upon
my soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses,
when he wrote the history of the plagues of Egypt.
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