We filled up in six weeks. Our luck was the envy of the eleven other vessels in Marguerita Bay. This luck was mainly due to “Black Jake,” a huge Jamaica negro, with the face of a Caliban, the arm of a Hercules and a stomach greater than an ostrich’s for rum. When we left San Francisco he had a tier of twenty-five bottles, full, stored under his bunk, and not a soul was ever the wiser for it until all were emptied. He kept his own head level, his own counsel, and lying in his berth in the early evening hours of his watch below, would roll over, turn his back to the noisy, chattering Kanaka audience of the forecastle, and put the bottle, but not to his neighbors’ lips. He was king of the forecastle, king of the Kanaka crew, and king of the whaleboat when after a “muscle-digger.” He could throw a harpoon twice as far as an ordinary man, and it was to this force of muscle, added to a certain knack of his own in working up to the “grayback,” before striking, and managing the boat after, that we owed our successful voyage. Great was his fame as a whale-killer in Marguerita Bay. Many were the offers made by masters of other vessels to bribe him from us. He remained true to us. Hard were the knocks the cows gave their boats and sometimes their crews. One well-appointed schooner lying near us had her boats stove twenty-six times during our stay. Twelve men out of the fleet were more or less injured. “Dese yere whale,” Jake would remark to his audiences in the night yarns when one or two other boats’ crews from other vessels came on board, “dey aint’ like oder whales. Dar ways are ’culiar, and ye got to mind sharp how ye get onto ’em.” But nobody ever solved Jake’s “’culiar way o’ getting onto ’em.”