What a lesson was here taught us nominal Christians by this poor native! An inhabitant of an island but a few years since barbarous, dying strong in the faith of a blessed immortality beyond the grave. If all the missionaries who have left their homes to labor for the spread of the Gospel among the heathen had accomplished no more, through Christ, than the salvation of this one native, yet were they well repaid. “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” At four P.M. all sail was taken in, the ensign half-mast, and again were all hands called to “witness burial service.” After the usual ceremonies, which were very affecting, the plank was raised, and the body committed to the deep. Reader, when you die, it will be, we trust, in the Sabbath calm of your hushed chamber; but the poor sailor dies at sea, between the narrow decks of his rolling home. The last accents that reach your ear will be those of love and affection, such as alone flow from a mother’s heart and a sister dear; the last sounds that reach the dying sailor’s ear are the hoarse murmur of that wave which seems impatient to grasp its victim. You will be buried beneath the green tree, where love and grief may go to strew their flowers and cherish your virtues; but the poor sailor is hearsed in the dark depths of the ocean, there to drift about in its under-currents till the great judgment day. Alas! for the poor sailor, often the child of misfortune, impulse, and error, his brief life fraught with privations, hardship, and peril, his grave, at last, the foaming deep! Though man pity him not, may God, in his great mercy, remember his weaknesses and trials, and save him through his Son! From this time until about the 15th of April we were very successful, obtaining, in three weeks’ time, about three hundred barrels of oil. This, with the whales we captured in the China Sea, increased our store nearly four hundred barrels since leaving Hong Kong. As a matter of course, all hands, from captain to cook, were in the best possible humor. This was our last cruise, and “every whale counted.” We were now steering for the Bonin Islands, to procure turtle, sweet potatoes, watermelons, etc. Saturday, April 30th, brought to view a sail on our weather beam, the clipper whaler “Jireh Perry,” of New Bedford, Captain Lawrence. This man was a perfect tyrant on board ship, and no crew had ever sailed with him from home and returned. It was stated, and pretty generally believed, that he had killed no less than three men since he had become master of a ship; yet, because he always was fortunate enough to obtain large quantities of oil, and mean enough to treat his crew so that they would all desert at the last port touched at before leaving for home rather than go home in the ship, thereby leaving _all_ the profits to the owners, he could obtain a ship of whom he liked.