"Ay, ay; you are a prudent fellow, and I like you all the better for it. But you have had leisure, and a plenty of it too, to make up your mind. You must know the schooner from her keel up by this time, and ought to be able to say now that you are willing to take luck's chances in her."
"Ay, ay, sir; that's all true enough, so far as the craft is concerned. If this was a West India v'y'ge, I wouldn't stand a minute about signing the articles; nor should I make much question if the craft was large enough for a common whalin' v'y'ge; but, sealin' is a different business, and one onprofitable hand may make many an onprofitable lay."
"All this is true enough; but we do not intend to take any unprofitable hands, or to have any unprofitable lays, You know me--"
"Oh! if all was like you, captain Gar'ner, I wouldn't stand even to wipe the pen. Your repitation was made in the southward, and no man can dispute your skill."
"Well, both mates are old hands at the business, and we intend that all the 'ables' shall be as good men as you are yourself."
"It needs good men, sir, to be operatin' among some of them sea-elephants! Sea-dogs; for sea-dogs is my sayin'. They tell of seals getting scurce; but I say, it's all in knowin' the business--'There's young captain Gar'ner,' says I, 'that's fittin' out a schooner for some onknown part of the world,' says I, 'maybe for the South Pole, for-ti-know, or for some sich out-of-the-way hole; now he'll come back full, or I'm no judge o' the business,' says I."
"Well, if this is your way of thinking, you have only to clap your name to the articles, and take your lay."
"Ay, ay, sir; when I've seed my shipmates. There isn't the business under the sun that so much needs that every man should be true, as the sea-elephant trade. Smaller animals may be got along with, with a narvous crew, perhaps; but when it comes to the raal old bulls, or bull-dogs, as a body might better call 'em, give me stout hearts, as well as stout hands."
'Well, now, to my notion, Watson, it is less dangerous to take a sea-elephant than to fasten to a regular old bull-whale, that may be has had half a dozen irons in him already."
"Yes, sir, that's sometimes skeary work, too; though I don't think so much of a whale as I do of a sea-elephant, or of a sea-lion. 'Let me know my shipmates,' say I, 'on a sealin' expedition.'"