After entering the Atlantic Ocean we steered to the northward and westward, until we arrived in latitude 32° south, longitude 7° east. This locality is known as the Carroll ground, and is a favorite resort of the South Atlantic whalemen. Here, as we had good weather, but saw no whales, all hands were occupied in repairing and renewing the rigging, to get the ship in order for a return home. It is a great point of honor among seamen to return their rigging in as good, if not better order than when they received it, with a view to commendation from their owners; consequently the lower rigging was turned in anew, particular care being taken to have everything as nice as possible: blocks must be new-strapped, and neatly covered with canvas; all service that looked in the least chafed, or white, must be removed; the yards stripped and rigging-fitted; the ratlines taken off the mizzen topmast and foretopgallant rigging; the rigging fore and aft, alow and aloft, must be rattled down, and a coat of tar then applied to all the hemp material; the paint-work, inside and out, from the copper to the trucks must be renewed, and the spars scraped: then we will be ready for home. All this must be done before the 27th of January, at which time we are to leave the whaling-ground; so that we will have nothing to occupy us after that date, except to make as speedy a passage as possible to New Bedford.
On the Carroll ground we entered upon the New Year. On the 4th of January we gammoned the ship Messenger, of New Bedford. She left the Madagascar ground four days after us, and had been boxing off the Cape for twenty-one days; so that we esteemed ourselves fortunate in having escaped such miserable weather with no further detention than we experienced. Her crew were affected by a peculiar malady, which somewhat resembled moon-blindness: more or less of them had been affected with it during the whole voyage; and at the present time there were eight men in her forecastle who could not see each other after dark, but whose vision during the day was perfectly good and clear. One of them whilst aboard of our vessel complained of pain across the temples in the daytime. He was the only one of those afflicted who expressed a sense of pain or inconvenience, apart from loss of sight. I have seen individual cases before, but never in such numbers aboard a single ship. Their captain attributed it to moon-blindness; but these men positively assured me that they had not slept with their faces exposed to the moon’s rays. Again, it disappeared on their near approach to land; and at one time they were completely relieved of it by the use of Irish potatoes. The men themselves attributed the malady either to the tarræ root, of which they had consumed a large quantity on the voyage, or else to their water, which, as they stated, had been for a long time brackish and unwholesome. I am inclined to think that it originated from the bilge-water; for a similar case from this cause came under my notice some years since.
Whilst amongst the Abrolhas’, I was called upon by the captain of the Europa to administer to a Portuguese, whose eyes were affected by sleeping in the moon’s rays. I bled him, and applied blisters to the temples. This treatment produced almost instantaneous relief. I informed the Messenger’s people of this; but their captain was one of the old school, who believing that all the ailments mankind are heir to can be cured by salts, would employ no other remedy; and, whether the disease was a cold, a fever from a broken or dislocated member, or what not, his prescription was a full dose of it, whereof he constantly kept a large quantity on hand, of the denomination known as Glauber salts, used ashore for horses.
On the 16th we gammoned with the ship Mary, of New Bedford. Her captain requested me to go aboard of her, and administer to her cooper, who had for a long time been very sick. In compliance with his request I did so. In her steerage I found the wreck of an unusually symmetrically-formed man, suffering from an affection of the liver. I did what I could for him; but then, as the boat would not return to our ship for several hours, I began to fear that the time would pass tediously. My apprehension, however, was speedily banished by the attention I found myself compelled to give to the yarns of my patient, who, like all old seamen, was garrulous; and, as I was a good listener, (of which I pride myself,) he was soon rehearsing his manifold adventures from his youth upwards, embracing forty-five years of sea life. He told me, that during this time he had served in every situation aboard a whaler, from cabin-boy to master; and he mentioned some half-a-dozen well-known whaling captains who had served their novitiate in his boat. He stated, that during the South American revolutions he had been privateering, and was for many years in both the naval and merchant service. He had visited almost every country of the globe to which commerce directs her conveyances: at times (to use his own expression) flush, with plenty of money; at others, alone, without a change of clothing, amongst semi-civilized nations. He was a grandfather; and stated, that his first wife, with whom he had lived for many years, had taken umbrage at his assuming the sailor’s privilege of having a wife in every port, and left him. After the legal forms had been gone through with, she consoled herself by taking another spouse.
Her husband, not to be a whit behind her, took his ship home again, sailed to the island of New Zealand, and in Mungunui married an English girl, twenty years his junior. He then engaged in the English whaling-service, wherein he accumulated considerable money, and after the lapse of a few years returned to the States, taking his wife and their two children with him. At home, he for some years rested; but the continual yearning for the sea experienced by all who have once been afloat, and not been disgusted with life thereon, induced him, in his old age, to ship as cooper of the Mary. No sooner was he afloat, however, than on exerting himself he found that his was not now a system such as that which had carried him through so many years of hardship and exposure. Fast living and imprudence had done their work, and his constitution was gone. The bracing sea-air, instead of invigorating, depressed and weakened him. Dispirited, he was at last laid up, like a worn-out hulk, without power or will to be engaged in aught but the most puerile employments. During his stay aboard the Mary (rather over two years) he had not heard from home; and, being very ingenious, he had, to occupy his mind and drive away heart-sickness, employed himself by scrimschawing, and had completed a store of unique and carefully-fabricated articles of various descriptions, from woods he procured in the different ports he had visited, or from ivory and bone.
The boat being now ready to return, I left the narrator, and went aboard our own ship. I informed the captain that he must send him into the nearest port, (St. Helena,) where he might procure rest and good medical treatment. This he thought inexpedient; but, by dint of pressing, I convinced him of the absolute necessity of such a course. After carrying my point, I had the curiosity to ask him about the cooper’s antecedents; because I had not given full credence to all his story, inasmuch as old sailors are so famous for drawing a long bow. The captain gave me a rehearsal of his past life, which fully substantiated all that he had said of himself; and, after he had finished it, I left him, with the conviction that I had seen the most practical illustration possible of a career at sea, where Christianity or morality had not held the helm. Here was a man, who had made much more than a competency during life, and who had walked his own quarter-deck, after having gained his position by his own unaided personal exertion, reduced at the end of a life-time of battling with the elements to a subordinate station—sick, debilitated, and uncared-for—aged, weak, and careworn—far away from home, without the fostering attentions of a wife or children to render the couch of sickness other than a bed of thorns; and this lamentable situation brought on, not by the villany or mismanagement of others, but, according to his own confession, by his individual imprudence.
The Mary, like the Messenger, had on board some half-a-dozen persons whose eyes were affected mysteriously. She was down by the head, and had (as was also the case with the Messenger) been so trimmed on the whole voyage, which trim facilitates the collection of putrid water in the forward part of the ship’s hold; hence, by taking into consideration these singular coincidents of the vessels, together with the fact that no one who lived abaft the mainmast had been so affected in either, the disease may, I think, be safely attributed to bilge-water.
After gammoning with the Mary, we ran close in to the African coast, and fell in with several Atlantic whaling-vessels. These crafts are usually small, and carry but two or three boats. By the class who go farther from home, they are facetiously denominated Plumpuddingers. The length of the voyage ranges from six to thirty months. From the specimens of these cruisers, I should say, that there is little difference in their arrangements and those of the whalemen of the Indian and Pacific oceans. One characteristic was, however, distinctive; that is, the greater proportion of foreigners before the mast. In one vessel (the Cornelia of Edgartown) there was not a single individual of American birth in her forecastle; and on board the Keoka, of Westport, there was a large proportion of dark skins from the islands of the North Pacific. Their voyages are shorter, their crews generally fare better than those of the larger ships, and, as was my impression up to the time we fell in with them, they made better ports—but this, upon inquiry, I found to be a mistaken idea; for those on board the Keoka stated that they had not been into a port where English was spoken during the whole time (some eighteen months) they were from home; and, furthermore, that they had only visited Walfisch Bay, a Portuguese settlement on the coast.
These vessels averaged about the same amount of oil, considering their time out, as other ships of their profession in the Indian Ocean. Their crews were, also, just as much discontented with whaling, and as anxious to get home, as we were. In unqualified terms they expressed their envy of us lucky fellows, as they termed us, who they supposed would in a few months be in New Bedford. Our diminutive cargo did not seem to act as a damper upon their wishes. They said that they did not care, when it came to the question of getting home, whether they had anything coming to them, or not. Neither did the prospect of cold weather appal them; for one enthusiastic fellow assured me, that he was willing to be landed on a snow-bank, in a costume but little preferable to a straw-hat without trimming, for the sake of being delivered from the monotonous life he was now leading.
After leaving these vessels, we squared our yards, and rolled before the delightful southeast trades (the elysium of the seafaring-man) towards St. Helena, taking it very easy—only sending aloft the studding-sails on the foremast and foretopmasts, and at night jogging along under easy sail in that direction: it being our intention to make a short stay at that rock-bound isle for letters, and then to crack on everything for home.