sion on the jury.
When I showed how I had been tied with ropes for two days, with my hands
fastened behind my back for seventeen nights and days in the roasting
hot weather, it actually made some of the jury grit their teeth. The
jury retired, and were out quite a number of hours. Finally, they
brought in a verdict of "Not guilty," but for a long time they stood ten
for guilty and two for acquittal. After that, he never could get a
mate's position on any ship in the United States, so he went to
Australia and, when last heard from, was captain of an English ship.

The Prospero, on one of her voyages, was dismasted by a typhoon in the
China Sea, was towed into one of the treaty ports in China and used as a
coal hulk.

I went back to New York with father and mother, was gladly received by
all my friends, and remained there until I took a notion in my thick
head to go on a whaling voyage to the Pacific Ocean.

CHAPTER II

WHALING IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

I was in the habit of walking around the docks of the East and North
Rivers in New York and looking at the shipping. Fronting the river were
a number of shipping offices for sailors, and some of them had a placard
offering eighty dollars advance for men for the whaling service. So, one
day, I went into one of the offices and stated my desires. I was very
cordially received. That evening, with several others, I was sent to New
Bedford, Mass. On our arrival there we were assigned to a sailors'
boarding-house. In about two weeks afterward I was shipped on board the
Courier, for a three years' cruise in the South Pacific Ocean, for the
capture of sperm whales. I was to get one barrel of oil for myself out
of every one hundred and ninety that we should capture. Sperm oil was
worth about two dollars a gallon. No petroleum had been discovered at
that time.

I was furnished with a seaman's outfit, which, with my board bill and
expenses, amounted exactly to eighty dollars; that was the advance. I
signed an agreement that the captain should pay that amount out of the
first money due me. Captain Coffin, four mates, and four boat-steerers
were the officers of the ship, with twenty-eight men before the mast, a
cooper, blacksmith, carpenter, cook, and steward--forty-two men on the
vessel, and the captain's wife and little boy.

The night before we sailed I wrote to my father and mother and let them
know what I had done. I thought at the time that I knew more than they
did.