It would be unpardonable, in this catalogue, to omit the cook, David Mizzle. He was round, and fat, and oily, as one of his own "duff" puddings. To look at him you could not help suspecting that he purloined and ate at least half of the salt pork he cooked, and his sly, dimpling laugh, in which every feature participated, from the point of his broad chin to the top of his bald head, rather tended to favour this supposition. Mizzle was prematurely bald--being quite a young man--and when questioned on the subject, he usually attributed it to the fact of his having been so long employed about the cooking coppers, that the excessive heat to which he was exposed had stewed all the hair off his head! The crew was made up of stout, active men in the prime of life, nearly all of whom had been more or less accustomed to the whale-fishing, and some of the harpooners were giants in muscular development and breadth of shoulder, if not in height. Chief among these harpooners was Amos Parr, a short, thick-set, powerful man of about thirty-five, who had been at sea since he was a little boy, and had served in the fisheries of both the Northern and Southern Seas. No one knew what country had the honour of producing him--indeed, he was ignorant of that point himself; for, although he had vivid recollections of his childhood having been spent among green hills, and trees, and streamlets, he was sent to sea with a strange captain before he was old enough to care about the name of his native land. Afterwards he ran away from his ship, and so lost all chance of ever discovering who he was; but, as he sometimes remarked, he didn't much care who he was, so long as he was _himself_; so it didn't matter. From a slight peculiarity in his accent, and other qualities, it was surmised that he must be an Irishman--a supposition which he rather encouraged, being partial to the sons, and particularly partial to the daughters, of the Emerald Isle, one of which last he had married just six months before setting out on this whaling expedition. Such were the _Dolphin_ and her crew, and merrily they bowled along over the broad Atlantic with favouring winds, and without meeting with anything worthy of note until they neared the coast of Greenland. One fine morning, just as the party in the cabin had finished breakfast, and were dallying with the last few morsels of the repast, as men who have more leisure than they desire are wont to do, there was a sudden shock felt, and a slight tremor passed through the ship as if something had struck her. "Ha!" exclaimed Captain Guy, finishing his cup of chocolate, "there goes the first bump." "Ice ahead, sir," said the first mate, looking down the skylight. "Is there much?" asked the captain, rising and taking down a small telescope from the hook on which it usually hung. "Not much, sir--only a stream; but there is an ice-blink right ahead all along the horizon." "How's her head, Mr. Bolton?" "Nor'-west and by north, sir."