"butcher shops adrift," and on account of the slovenly condition of their hulls, spars, sails, and rigging, a "spouter" was generally regarded among seamen as one of the biggest jokes afloat. As a matter of fact the whale is about as stupid and inoffensive a creature as exists, and when occasionally he does some harm—smashing up a boat, for instance—it is usually in a flurry of fright, with no malice or intent to kill. If a whale possessed the instinct of self-defence he could never be captured with a harpoon, but he has evidently been created as he is for the benefit of mankind, and incidentally as a temptation to scribes, from the days of the indigestible Jonah even to the piscatory romancers of our own times.
Well, the captain of the Espirito Santo, after filling his water-casks, laying in a stock of provisions, and giving his crew a run ashore sheeted home his topsails, hove up anchor, and departed. Young Nat took such a lively interest in the welfare of this craft that he carefully watched her progress until the last shred of her canvas faded upon the horizon. He judged by the sun, for he had no compass, that her course was about south.
Three days after the departure of the Espirito Santo, the Hersilia appeared. Captain Sheffield had found nothing and seen nothing, except the cold, gray sky, and the long, ceaseless heaving of the Southern Ocean's mighty breast, a few stray, hungry, screeching albatross, and once in a while, for a moment, a whale, with smooth, glistening back, spouting jets of feathery spray high in the keen, misty air, then sounding among the caverns of the
