Again she went cruising and secured 2,500 barrels of oil and 35,000 pounds of bone, bringing both into San Francisco in 1851, where she disposed of the oil for $73,450 and shipped the bone to her home port where it brought $12,500. To complete the record of her good luck, San Francisco merchants offered $6,000 for the condemned old bark that had, in two years, or thereabout, brought to her owners and venturesome crew the sum of $138,450.
With the captain’s share as one-seventeenth of the “lay” the skipper of the Envoy must have made $8,000. “There were common sailors on that ship that turned up a thousand dollars in pocket when they were paid off,” said Ben Gibson, when we were discussing it. “The second mate, with his one-forty-fifth, cleaned up three thousand. Hope I’ll do half as well in the same length of time with the Scarboro.”
I learned that the largest catch brought into port by an American whaler, as the result of a single cruise, included 5,300 barrels of oil and 200 barrels of sperm, with 50,000 pounds of bone. It was taken in a voyage lasting only 28 months by the South America, of Providence, Captain R. N. Sowle. It sold for $89,000 in 1849, and the cost of ship and outfit was $40,000.
The Pioneer, of New London, Captain Ebenezer Morgan, holds the medal for the largest sum realized from a single voyage. She left her home port on June 4, 1864, for Davis Strait and returned a year and three months later with a cargo of 1,391 barrels of oil and 22,650 pounds of bone, which sold at war-time prices for $150,000. The outfitting of this craft cost $35,000.
“Those are all great tales,” quoth Tom Anderly, when we had marveled over these lucky voyages. “But how about the brig Emeline of New Bedford? She sailed on July 11, 1841 and in twenty-six months she returned home with how much ile d’you suppose?”
Ben and I gave it up. Some enormous sum, we supposed, was realized.
“Yah!” said Tom. “A fat lot. Twenty-six months and ten barrels of ile, and her skipper killed by a whale.”
“Oh, now that you’re on the hard luck tack,” quoth Ben, “there was the Junior, of New Bedford. I’ve heard my uncle tell of her. Out a year and two months and put back to port clean—and the crew plumb disgusted. Could you blame ’em?”
This conversation went on between our watches while the three sperm whales were being butchered. There was a peculiarity about these cachelots that I failed to mention. We butchered them in a different manner than we did the Greenland, or right, whale. The cachelot has no baleen but it furnishes spermaceti. A large, nearly triangular cavity in the right side of the head, called the “case” (sometimes spermaceti is called “case oil”) is lined with a beautiful, silver-like membrane, and covered by a thick layer of muscular fibres. This cavity contains a secretion of an oily fluid which, after the death of the animal, congeals into a granulated yellowish-hued substance. Our whale, the first of the school killed by the second mate’s boat—had in its case a tun, or ten barrels, of spermaceti!
While the trying-out operations were under way we lost, of course, that school of sperms; but we drifted some miles into the south, and as soon as Captain Rogers could get canvas on her, we made a splendid run for two days west of south and so caught up either with that same school, or with another herd of cachelots.