certainly tried hard.

It was dark before we got our prize secured by the fluke-chain,
so that we could not commence operations before morning. That
night it blew hard, and we got an idea of the strain these
vessels are sometimes subjected to. Sometimes the ship rolled
one way and the whale another, being divided by a big sea, the
wrench at the fluke-chain, as the two masses fell apart down
different hollows, making the vessel quiver from truck to keelson
as if she was being torn asunder. Then we would come together
again with a crash and a shock that almost threw everybody out of
their bunks. Many an earnest prayer did I breathe that the chain
would prove staunch, for what sort of a job it would be to go
after that whale during the night, should he break loose, I could
only faintly imagine. But all our gear was of the very best; no
thieving ship-chandler had any hand in supplying our outfit with
shoddy rope and faulty chain, only made to sell, and ready at the
first call made upon it to carry away and destroy half a dozen
valuable lives. There was one coil of rope on board which the
skipper had bought for cordage on the previous voyage from a
homeward-bound English ship, and it was the butt of all the
officers' scurrilous remarks about Britishers and their gear. It
was never used but for rope-yarns, being cut up in lengths, and
untwisted for the ignominious purpose of tying things up
--"hardly good enough for that," was the verdict upon it.

Tired as we all were, very little sleep came to us that night--we
were barely seasoned yet to the exigencies of a whaler's life
--but afterwards I believe nothing short of dismasting or running
the ship ashore would wake us, once we got to sleep. In the