“'The Connemara,' says he.
“'And what is your name?' So he told him, 'Jem Green.'
“The other brings a great mutton fist down on the table, and makes all the glasses dance. 'You stay at your moorings till I come back,' says he. 'I have got something belonging to you, Jem Green,' and he sheered off. The others lay to and passed the grog. Presently the long one comes back with a harpoon steel in his hand; there was Connemara stamped on it, and also 'James Green' graved with a knife. 'Is that yours?' 'Is my hand mine?' says Jem; 'but wasn't there a broken shaft to it!”
“'There was,' says the Yankee harpooner; 'I cut it out.'
“'Well!' says Jem, 'that is the harpoon we were fast by to this very whale. Where did you kill her?'
“'In the Greenland seas.' And he whips out his private log. 'Here you are,' says he; 'March 25, 1820, latitude so and so, killed a right whale; lost half the blubber, owing to the carcass sinking; cut an English harpoon out of her.'
“'Avast there, mate!' cried Jem, and he whips, out his log; 'overhaul that.' The other harpooner overhauled it. 'Mates, look, here,' says he; 'I reckon we hain't fathomed the critters yet. The Britisher struck her in the Pacific on the 5th of March, and we killed her off Greenland on the 25th, five thousand miles of water by the lowest reckoning.' By this time there were a dozen heads jammed together, like bees swarming, over the two logs. 'She got a wound in the Pacific! “Hallo!” says she; “this is no sea for a lady to live in;” so she up helm, and right away across the pole into the Atlantic, and met her death.'”
“Your story has an interest you little suspect, young gentleman. If this is true, the northwest passage is proved.”
“That has been proved a hundred times, sir, and in a hundred ways; the only riddle is to find it. The man that tells you there is not a northwest passage is no sailor, and the fish that can't find it is not a whale; for there is not a young suckling no bigger than this room that does not know that passage as well as a mid on his first voyage knows the way to the mizzen-top through lubber's hole. How tired you must be of whales, ladies?”
“Oh no.”