There must have been something about the whale fishery highly inspiring to the imagination, though to see one of the greasy old Nantucket or New Bedford blubber hunters wallowing about in the South Pacific, one would hardly have suspected it, yet among the spinners of good, tough tarry sea yarns, some of the authors of narratives relating to the pursuit and capture of the whale are easily entitled to wear champion belts as masters of pure fiction. Whaling is one of the least hazardous, the most commonplace, and, taken altogether about the laziest occupation that human beings have ever been engaged in upon the sea. Sailors aboard the clippers fifty years ago used to refer to whale ships as “butcher shops adrift,” and on account of the slovenly condition of their hulls, spars, sails, and rigging, a “spouter” was generally regarded among seamen as one of the biggest jokes afloat. As a matter of fact the whale is about as stupid and inoffensive a creature as exists, and when occasionally he does some harm--smashing up a boat, for instance--it is usually in a flurry of fright, with no malice or intent to kill. If a whale possessed the instinct of self-defence he could never be captured with a harpoon, but he has evidently been created as he is for the benefit of mankind, and incidentally as a temptation to scribes, from the days of the indigestible Jonah even to the piscatory romancers of our own times. Well, the captain of the _Espirito Santo_, after filling his water-casks, laying in a stock of provisions, and giving his crew a run ashore sheeted home his topsails, hove up anchor, and departed. Young Nat took such a lively interest in the welfare of this craft that he carefully watched her progress until the last shred of her canvas faded upon the horizon. He judged by the sun, for he had no compass, that her course was about south.