 and such like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all merchant
seamen, and also all pirates and man-of-war's men, and slave-ship sailors,
cherish such a scornful feeling toward whale-ships; this is a question it would
be hard to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know
whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes
ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows. And besides, when a
man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation for his
superior altitude. Hence, I conclude, that in boasting himself to be high lifted
above a whaleman, in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.
    But what is a Gam? You might wear out your index finger running up and down
the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson never attained
to that erudition; Noah Webster's ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same
expressive word has now for many years been in constant use among some fifteen
thousand true-born Yankees. Certainly, it needs a definition, and should be
incorporated into the Lexicon. With that view, let me learnedly define it.
    GAM. NOUN - A social meeting of two (or more) whale-ships, generally on a
cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats'
crews: the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the
two chief mates on the other.
    There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten here.
All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so has the
whale-fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave-ship, when the captain is rowed
anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern-sheets on a comfortable,
sometimes cushioned seat there, and often steers himself with a pretty little
milliner's tiller decorated with gay cords and ribbons. But the whale-boat has
no seat astern, no sofa of that sort whatever, and no tiller at all. High times
indeed, if whaling-captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty
old aldermen in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits
of any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete boat's crew must
leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of the number,
that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion
