e college of Santa Claus and
St. Pott's, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box
of sperm candles for his trouble--this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he
spied the book, assured me that "Dan Coopman" did not mean "The Cooper,"
but "The Merchant." In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch book
treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained
a very interesting account of its whale fishery. And in this chapter it
was, headed, "Smeer," or "Fat," that I found a long detailed list of the
outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from
which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following:

400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock
fish. 550,000 lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins
of butter. 20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese
(probably an inferior article). 550 ankers of Geneva. 10,800 barrels of
beer.

Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in
the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes,
barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer.

At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all
this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were
incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic
application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my
own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by
every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen
whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and
Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their
naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous by the
nature of their vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game
in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country
where the convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil.

The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those
polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that
climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen,
including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much
exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet
of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say,
we have precisely two barrels of bee