In good time making the desired longitude upon the equator, a few leagues west of the Gallipagos, we spent several weeks chassezing across the Line, to and fro, in unavailing search for our prey.  For some of their hunters believe, that whales, like the silver ore in Peru, run in veins through the ocean.  So, day after day, daily; and week after week, weekly, we traversed the self-same longitudinal intersection of the self-same Line; till we were almost ready to swear that we felt the ship strike every time her keel crossed that imaginary locality.

At length, dead before the equatorial breeze, we threaded our way straight along the very Line itself.  Westward sailing; peering right, and peering left, but seeing naught.

It was during this weary time, that I experienced the first symptoms of that bitter impatience of our monotonous craft, which ultimately led to the adventures herein recounted.

But hold you!  Not a word against that rare old ship, nor its crew.  The sailors were good fellows all, the half, score of pagans we had shipped at the islands included.  Nevertheless, they were not precisely to my mind.  There was no soul a magnet to mine; none with whom to mingle sympathies; save in deploring the calms with which we were now and then overtaken; or in hailing the breeze when it came.  Under other and livelier auspices the tarry knaves might have developed qualities more attractive.  Had we sprung a leak, been “stove” by a whale, or been blessed with some despot of a captain against whom to stir up some spirited revolt, these shipmates of mine might have proved limber lads, and men of mettle.  But as it was, there was naught to strike fire from their steel.

There were other things, also, tending to make my lot on ship-board very hard to be borne.  True, the skipper himself was a trump; stood upon no quarter-deck dignity; and had a tongue for a sailor.  Let me do him justice, furthermore:  he took a sort of fancy for me in particular; was sociable, nay, loquacious, when I happened to stand at the helm.  But what of that?  Could he talk sentiment or philosophy?  Not a bit.  His library was eight inches by four:  Bowditch, and Hamilton Moore.

And what to me, thus pining for some one who could page me a quotation from Burton on Blue Devils; what to me, indeed, were flat repetitions of long-drawn yams, and the everlasting stanzas of Black-eyed Susan sung by our full forecastle choir?  Staler than stale ale.

Ay, ay, Arcturion!  I say it in no malice, but thou wast exceedingly dull.  Not only at sailing:  hard though it was, that I could have borne; but in every other respect.  The days went slowly round and round, endless and uneventful as cycles in space.  Time, and time-pieces; How many centuries did my hammock tell, as pendulum-like it swung to the ship’s dull roll, and ticked the hours and ages.  Sacred forever be the Areturion’s fore-hatch—­alas! sea-moss is over it now—­and rusty forever the bolts that held together that old sea hearth-stone, about which we so often lounged.  Nevertheless, ye lost and leaden hours, I will rail at ye while life lasts.