They had already broken out some of our cargo. The cargo consisted largely of casks, which were variously labelled with chalk or white paint, and some of the new casks, light colored, with that black paint which is used in putting the addresses on wooden boxes or cases. Of the new casks some were labelled “Bread,” some “Flour,” and so on through our list of food that would keep. The “bread” was not the soft kind that I was familiar with in the form of light, delicately brown loaves—my mother’s. It was hardbread, or hardtack, and it looked much like dogbread, like a rock when freshly baked. Good dogbread tastes better than old hardtack, but hardtack in good {99} condition is pretty good. It is good for the teeth. Of course there were no casks of green vegetables, or of eggs or of butter or of milk, or of many other things which we think necessary to our well-being ashore. There were some of salt beef, such as it was. The casks which contained the bread and the flour and what-not, when they had been emptied in the regular course of events, would be filled with oil. We had been out too short a time to empty many of these casks, and others were being hoisted from the hold, with the legend “Heads and hoops.” There were shooks of staves, too, the staves for each cask hooped together tightly, and bearing some resemblance to fasces. If I had known at that time what fasces were, I should have expected to see the sharp head of a cutting-spade projecting from each bundle. Such a bundle might be borne before a whaling captain as the symbol of his authority. But I had never heard of fasces, and I was interested only in the process of opening the casks and getting out the heads and hoops. The bundles of staves would come later. The cooper was in charge of this work, but a number of men were helping him. There is always more or less cooper work being done on a whaler, and there were half a dozen men in the crew who were pretty skilful at it. There was an abundance of cooper’s tools on board, especially of hammers and the little tools that are set against the hoops, and struck or tapped with the hammer held in the right hand, to drive the hoops up or down. I think these were called “tappers,” but I am not sure at this moment. Names which were once familiar to me have a curious habit of slipping from my mind and eluding all my efforts to recover them. I suppose it is a symptom of age. The old-fashioned name of a perforated skimmer about five or six inches across, very slightly concave upwards, and with a flat iron handle—somewhat {100} resembling the try-pot skimmers on a small scale—has eluded me in that way for some years. I almost have it, and it is gone. My mother or my grandmother could have told me in an instant, but I suppose it is of no use to ask anybody now.