His smile faded swiftly. “Do you?” he said. “Do you? I hoped it would n’t be that. It begins to look—or it has been looking for some time as if the whaling business would die out. It won’t be a good business for some time, if it does n’t go from bad to worse. Have you thought of that, Timmie?”
I shook my head. “I want to go whaling,” I said again.
He laughed, and then he sighed. “It ’s a bad business for your mother and me,” he said, “to have our boy starting out on a voyage at fifteen for three or four years. But if you will you will, and I ’d better see about getting you a berth.” He turned and looked at the ship in the dock below. “There ’s a vessel the riggers should be through with soon. She should sail in a couple o’ weeks or thereabouts. I might get you in there. What do you say, Timmie?”
“Where is she going, father?”
“Well,” he answered slowly, “it ’s always hard to tell where a whaler ’s going. Wherever whales promise. But we braced and strengthened her for Ar’tic work. She ’s a good vessel now, Timmie, and thoroughly braced. I think likely she ’ll round the Horn, and make the Ar’tic next season. If she has luck in the South Seas she may hang over there another winter, and not try the Ar’tic until the next year. But the Ar’tic ’s where she ’s going sooner or later.”
“I don’t want to go to the Ar’tic, father. Where ’s the Clearchus going?”
My father looked around in surprise.
“The Clearchus!” he exclaimed. “Why she ’s in the stream. Her crew ’ll be aboard in an hour or two. Cap’n Nelson expects to sail to-day.”
“But where ’s she going?”
“Going sperm whaling, Hatteras, South Atlantic, Indian Ocean, probably, and South Seas. I don’t know, and I don’t suppose Cap’n Nelson knows. She is n’t going to the Ar’tic, that ’s sure.”