"P--her stern is so rusty that hang me if I can make out the letters--the name begins with a P; I can see that. There's a T in it, and the last letter looks like an H." "Yes, that's all right," said the skipper. "That's the old 'Plutarch.' She has been expected some time, and has had a long passage home; but she is one of the old Anno Dominy ships, and sails about as fast as you can whip a toad though tar. I was in her two v'y'ges myself in my young days, and we never could drive more than six knot out of her in a gale of wind. She seems to have a foul bottom, too. But she has crawled home at last, and she has brought a good load of ile, too. She had twenty-one hund'ed at last accounts, and that ain't to be sneezed at, nowadays." "No, indeed, it ain't," returned his partner. "But when was you in the Plutarch? Who had her then?" "Old Hosea Coffin had her; that's when she was new, and was called a dandy ship at that time. Then I steered a boat in her next v'y'ge with 'Bimelech Swain--you knew him?" "Yes, I remember; that's when I was in the 'Viper' on the Brazeel Banks." I could not but look with admiration upon these old veterans, who talked about long voyages round Cape Horn and on the "Banks" as though they had been mere pleasure trips across a harbor and back, or any such trifling matter. Two or three years in these old fellows' lives seemed like the same period in the history of nations, occupying but a line or two of the chronicler. But the vessel was rapidly drawing in round "Brant Point," and all my comrades, many of whom had not yet fully recovered from sea-sickness, had mustered on deck to see the low, sandy island and busy little town of Nantucket, which now lay fairly before us. Several more whaleships were lying at the wharves, some of them dismantled, and stripped to a girtline, others partly rigged for sea, and two or three hove down for coppering. This was in the summer of 1841, when Nantucket may be said to have been in the zenith of its prosperity. More new ships were built than in any previous season, and the general impression appeared to be that the partisan cries of "two dollars a day and roast beef to the laboring man" were to be literally fulfilled, and that the price of oil was to reach a standard positively fabulous. And so it did--fabulously low, as every poor whaleman can testify, who arrived in 1842-3, and sold his sperm oil for fifty or sixty cents a gallon.