th of
the poor German. When the sad news was told on board, there was a deep
silence, all work being carried on so quietly that we seemed like a crew
of dumb men. With a sentiment for which I should not have given our grim
skipper credit, the stars and stripes were hoisted half-mast, telling
the silent sky and moaning sea, sole witnesses besides ourselves, of the
sudden departure from among us of our poor shipmate. We got the whale
cut in as usual without any incident worth mentioning, except that the
peculiar shape of the jaw made it an object of great curiosity to all
of us who were new to the whale-fishing. Such malformations are not very
rare. They are generally thought to occur when the animal is young, and
its bones soft; but whether done in fighting with one another, or
in some more mysterious way, nobody knows. Cases have been known, I
believe, where the deformed whale does not appear to have suffered from
lack of food in consequence of his disability; but in each of the three
instances which have come under my own notice, such was certainly not
the case. These whales were what is termed by the whalers "dry-skins;"
that is, they were in poor condition, the blubber yielding less than
half the usual quantity of oil. The absence of oil makes it very hard
to cut up, and there is more work in one whale of this kind than in two
whose blubber is rich and soft. Another thing which I have also noticed
is, that these whales were much more difficult to tackle than others,
for each of them gave us something special to remember them by. But I
must not get ahead of my yarn.

The end of the week brought us up to the Aldabra Islands, one of
the puzzles of the world. For here, in these tiny pieces of earth,
surrounded by thousands of miles of sea, the nearest land a group of
islets like unto them, is found the gigantic tortoise, and in only one
other place in the wide world, the Galapagos group of islands in the
South Pacific. How, or by what strange freak of Dame Nature these
curious reptiles, sole survivals of another age, should come to be
found in this lonely spot, is a deep mystery, and one not likely to be
unfolded now. At any rate, there they are, looking as if some of them
might be coeval with Noah, so venerable and storm-beaten do they appear.

We made the island early on a Sunday morning, and, with the usual
celerity, worked the vessel into the fine harbour, called, from one
of the exploring ships, Euphrates Bay or Ha