We started to run up the Straits at about ten a.m.  At two p.m. we suddenly looked up from our toil, our attention called by a sudden lull in the wind.  We had rounded Saddle Point, a prominent headland, which shut off from us temporarily the violence of the gale.  Two hours later we found ourselves hauling up into the pretty little harbour of Port William, where, without taking more than a couple of hands off the work, the vessel was rounded-to and anchored with quite as little fuss as bringing a boat alongside a ship.  It was the perfection of seamanship.

Once inside the bay, a vessel was sheltered from all winds, the land being high and the entrance intricate.  The water was smooth as a mill-pond, though the leaden masses of cloud flying overhead and the muffled roar of the gale told eloquently of the unpleasant state affairs prevailing outside.  Two whale-ships lay here—­the Tamerlane, of New Bedford, and the chance, of Bluff Harbour.  I am bound to confess that there was a great difference is appearance between the Yankee and the colonial—­very much in favour of the former.  She was neat, smart, and seaworthy, looking as if just launched; but the chance looked like some poor old relic of a bygone day, whose owners, unable to sell her, and too poor to keep her in repair, were just letting her go while keeping up the insurance, praying fervently each day that she might come to grief, and bring them a little profit at last.

But although it is much safer to trust appearances in ships than in men, any one who summed up the chance from her generally outworn and poverty-stricken looks would have been, as I was, “way off.”  Old she was, with an indefinite antiquity, carelessly rigged, and vilely unkempt as to her gear, while outside she did not seem to have had a coat of paint for a generation.  She looked what she really was—­the sole survivor of the once great whaling industry of New Zealand.  For although struggling bay whaling stations did exist in a few sheltered places far away from the general run of traffic, the trade itself might truthfully be said to be practically extinct.  The old chance alone, like some shadow of the past, haunted Foveaux Straits, and made a better income for her fortunate owners than any of the showy, swift coasting steamers that rushed contemptuously past her on their eager way.

In many of the preceding pages I have, though possessing all an Englishman’s pride in the prowess of mine own people, been compelled to bear witness to the wonderful smartness and courage shown by the American whalemen, to whom their perilous calling seems to have become a second nature.  And on other occasions I have lamented that our own whalers, either at home or in the colonies, never seemed to take so kindly to the sperm whale fishery as the hardy “down Easters,” who first taught them the business; carried it on with increasing success, in spite of their competition and the depredations of the Alabama;