The active whaling-season is restricted to eight or ten weeks,
and every one on board a whaler from captain to galley-devil works on a
lay. The captain gets one-twelfth of the take, the first mate one
twenty-second, the second mate one-thirtieth, the third mate one
forty-fifth, the carpenter one seventy-fifth, the steward one eightieth,
fore-mast sailors one eightieth, green hands one two-hundredth.
Engineers get about one hundred and twenty dollars a month straight. It
looks all right in the contract signed a year ago in a San Francisco
waterfront dive, but it never works out as it looks on paper. The A.B.
overdraws from the slop-chest (often before the whale is caught) the
vulgar-fraction which stands for his share of fat things, and you come
across him possessed of the sulky mood which dining on dead horse (land
or marine) induces in most of us.
A trade in fur also makes out by this Pacific-Arctic, Arctic-Pacific
route. We estimate that total products to the value of a million and a
half find their way each year out of Canada in the ships of the
whaling-fleet. "The farther north the finer fur" is a recognised law.
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