Life and Adventure in the South Pacific

NEW BEDFORD
A ROVING PRINTER.
NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE. 1861.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and sixty, by HARPER & BROTHERS, In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.
The present volume lays no claim to literary merit. Two young men, led to engage in the whale-fisheries, and spending five years in the employment, have compiled from their log-books and their recollection a plain, unvarnished narrative of this period. The work is placed before the public as an account of localities few have visited, and the detail of an employment of which little is generally known. The chief effort in the way of style has been to give vivid descriptions, and make the reader the companion of the traveler. Aside from the information of the volume, it is enlivened by “life on shipboard.”
In these days of many books, in which “voyages” have no small representation, it may seem almost presumptuous to put forth another tale of travel. Yet every traveler has his own experiences; and the sailors who offer here their narrative for the landsman’s inspection believe that their yarn is not an old one, and they have some confidence that the reader will not say it is a dull one.
LIFE AND ADVENTURE IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC.
The city of New Bedford, Mass., has for many years been the principal whaling-port of the United States. From there hundreds of young men have annually gone to different parts of the world to battle with the monsters of the deep, and, after a long and weary absence from home and friends, returned with ships “laden with the spoils.” It is not our purpose to give a description of this far-famed (among whalemen) place, but we trust it will prove interesting to the reader if we briefly sketch the modus operandi of fitting out a whaler, and “shipping a crew,” that if any one shall be tempted to see the world in a whaler, he may be put upon his guard against some of the impositions practiced upon “green hands” by the “shippers,” as they style themselves, of whaling-ports.