 time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this
beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were incidentally
suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic application; and,
furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my own, touching the probable
quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by every Low Dutch harpooneer in that
ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen whale-fishery. In the first place, the amount
of butter, and Texel and Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it,
though, to their naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous
by the nature of their vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game in
those frigid Polar seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country where the
convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil.
    The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those
Polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that climate, so
that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen, including the short voyage
to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed three months, say, and
reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5400 Low Dutch
seamen in all; therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man,
for a twelve weeks' allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550
ankers of gin. Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one
might fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up in a
boat's head, and take good aim at flying whales; this would seem somewhat
improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But this was very far
north, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with the constitution; upon the
Equator, in our Southern fishery, beer would be apt to make the harpooneer
sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his boat; and grievous loss might ensue to
Nantucket and New Bedford.
    But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers of two
or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English whalers have not
neglected so excellent an example. For, say they, when cruising in an empty
ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of
it, at least. And this empties the decanter.
 

                                  Chapter CII

                            A Bower in the Arsacides

Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the sperm whale, I have chiefly dwelt
upon
