After turning the whale up, we took him alongside our ship. When ships’ boats in company take a whale, it is customary, either to give one party the head and the body to the other, or else to release the ship whose boat fastened first from all further trouble with the prize: her companion taking the whale alongside, cutting him in, trying him out, and then either stowing down, or rafting half the oil to her companion. In case she stows it down, one-half of the barrels are branded with the other vessel’s name, and credited to her account. In the present case, Captain Perkins of the Plover wishing to make through us a consignment to the owners, we took the whale, and a boat’s crew of his assisted us to cut in. After trying out, one-half the oil, amounting to forty-six barrels, was stowed between decks in casks brought from his ship for the purpose and duly branded. We engaged to carry it home as freight, charging six cents per gallon for the carriage. We had also twelve hundred pounds of right whalebone on freight, from the ship Martha, of Fairhaven. This freight-business pays no one but the owners, and perhaps the captain: the proportion of it that any one else gets being so small as to make it a trifling object. On the same day that we stowed, we gammoned the barque Iowa, of Fairhaven. She had been very successful, having filled up with humpbacked oil at the Rosemary Islands. She was but a short time from Mauritius, and brought us the sad news of the demise of John Cunningham, of New Bedford, whom we had left at the hospital in Mauritius. The cause of his death was to some degree enveloped in mystery. It appears that on the day previous to his decease he applied to the resident physician of the hospital for a discharge, stating as his reason for it the many deaths that were daily occurring in the same ward in which he was (the dysentery having assumed a fatal type just after our leaving the port). The physician told him that he was loath to discharge him as yet, for his stricture was not entirely removed; but, after some urging on Cunningham’s part, the doctor directed him to apply on the following day, and he would make out his discharge. The morning following his attendants found him dead in his bed, without an external sign to show why the spirit had fled. The physicians, at a loss to account for so sudden and unexpected a termination, held a post-mortem examination upon his body, and finding all the organs free from disease, they gave in as their opinion that he had died from fright. Poor fellow!--his health aboard ship had been almost uninterruptedly good, and he bade fair to live as long as any of us. But Providence, for His own wise purposes, saw fit to call him away from life to (I trust) a better and happier sphere; and although in this world he will no more hear the storm whistling through the rigging, or the sudden boom of the tempest-tossed ocean, yet I hope that he