The first Sunday intervening after our departure from home, proved a bright, beautiful day, the sun rising in gorgeous splendor. After breakfast the chief mate went throughout the crew, and gave to all who were not already provided, a Bible or Testament, also tracts and religious papers. These books, I believe, were supplied by a Tract Society, in New Bedford, who customarily place the word of God aboard every ship that leaves the harbor. The books were all received with thankfulness; and I will here take occasion to state that I never heard a sailor speak irreverently of the Bible. Men aboard ship I have heard do so, but only in three instances, and in those cases they were neither sailors nor landsmen--incapable of filling a respectable position on either element; therefore their opinions were of little weight. Directly after we got outside, the peculiarity of the great Yankee nation began to manifest itself, and divers trades and speculations were set afloat; the ship’s company having been transformed into an Israelite assemblage worthy of South Street, Philadelphia, or Chatham Street, New York, bartering for and exchanging old and new clothes. Money is not a medium aboard a whale-ship, and the possessor of it usually stows it away in the corner of his chest as so much dross, of no value to him. Tobacco takes its place and is the currency; an article being valued, not at so many dollars, but at so many pounds and plugs of tobacco--thus substituting a vegetable for a metallic currency; and as most men coming to sea, whether they use the weed or not, provide themselves with a considerable quantity of it, some of the old hands accumulated quite a stock; several of them numbering their acquisitions by the hundred pounds. As they did not assign a motive for hoarding it, I wondered at the propensity, but was not enlightened until we made an Australian port, where, on account of the inferior article imported, and the high duty, making the price per pound treble of the best tobacco in the States, theirs, by smuggling it ashore, was readily disposable at a good return.