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could do anything, and had seen everything there was to see this side of the world. His father had been a soldier, and came out as one of the guard over a batch of prisoners in one of the first convict ships that sailed for Sydney. Well, as I was saying, Hughes went for a trip to Sydney, and he brought back a couple of new boats with him, so that we had four to commence our second season with. That was a lively season. Whales were numerous again, and we got on very well. In the middle of our busiest time we had the bad luck to have one of our new boats smashed—knocked to pieces without ever being fast to a whale. We were out one day, and hard at it, the boat in which I was being fast to a big fellow. He was properly handled, and was nigh about done, when another boat came up to put an iron into him. We could see that the whale was just dying—he was all of a tremble, and shooting about here and there—and we sang out to the other fellows to stand off; but I suppose they didn’t hear us; at any rate they came up in a round-about way, and were pretty close, when he suddenly made a rush right in their direction, and went clean over her, turning her over by sheer weight, and in a minute or two our bran new boat was floating about the bay in shingles. We cut our line sharp, and the whale sank dead after his last effort; but we picked him up two days afterwards and got him in all right. He was a good one too, though not the largest I have seen. The best one for oil I ever helped to try out was a cow in calf, that yielded about eleven tons.

“There was nobody hurt. We picked up the men in the water, and they didn’t think anything of the affair. We didn’t make such a precious fuss about a thing of that sort as people would nowadays. If they get a wet shirt now they must see the doctor, or else they die of a fright. We had no doctors,