old tunes and discords once more.

The captured whale made an addition to our cargo of one hundred and ten
barrels--a very fair haul indeed. The harpooners were disposed to regard
this capture as auspicious upon opening the North Pacific, where, in
spite of the time we had spent, and the fair luck we had experienced in
the Indian Ocean, we expected to make the chief portion of our cargo.

Our next cruising-ground is known to whalemen as the "Coast of Japan"
ground, and has certainly proved in the past the most prolific fishery
of sperm whales in the whole world. I am inclined now to believe
that there are more and larger cachalots to be found in the Southern
Hemisphere, between the parallels of 33deg. and 50deg. South; but there
the drawback of heavy weather and mountainous seas severely handicaps
the fishermen.

It is somewhat of a misnomer to call the Coast of Japan ground by that
name, since to be successful you should not sight Japan at all, but keep
out of range of the cold current that sweeps right across the Pacific,
skirting the Philippines, along the coasts of the Japanese islands
as far as the Kuriles, and then returns to the eastward again to the
southward of the Aleutian Archipelago. The greatest number of whales are
always found in the vicinity of the Bonin and Volcano groups of islands,
which lie in the eddy formed by the northward bend of the mighty current
before mentioned. This wonderful ground was first cruised by a London
whale-ship, the SYREN, in 1819, when the English branch of the sperm
whale-fishery was in its prime, and London skippers were proud of the
fact that one of their number, in the EMILIA, had thirty-one years
before first ventured around Cape Horn in pursuit of the cachalot.

After the advent of the SYREN, the Bonins became the favourite
fishing-ground for both Americans and British, and for many years the
catch of oil taken from these teeming waters averaged four thousand
tuns annually. That the value of the fishery was maintained at so high a
level for over a quarter of a century was doubtless due to the fact that
there was a long, self-imposed close season, during which the whales
were quite unmolested. Nothing in the migratory habits of this whale, so
far as has ever been observed, would have prevented a profitable fishing
all the year round; but custom, stronger even than profit, ordained that
whale-ships should never stay too long upon one fishing-ground, but move
on farther un