But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable, free-and-easy whaler!  What does the whaler do when she meets another whaler in any sort of decent weather?  She has a “Gam,” a thing so utterly unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the name even; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only grin at it, and repeat gamesome stuff about “spouters” and “blubber-boilers,” and such like pretty exclamations.  Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also all Pirates and Man-of-War’s men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such a scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard to answer.  Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it.  It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows.  And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation for his superior altitude.  Hence, I conclude, that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.

But what is a Gam?  You might wear out your index-finger running up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word, Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster’s ark does not hold it.  Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees.  Certainly, it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon.  With that view, let me learnedly define it.

Gam.  Noun—­A social meeting of two (or more) Whaleships, generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews, the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.

There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten here.  All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so has the whale fishery.  In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when the captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern sheets on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often steers himself with a pretty little milliner’s tiller decorated with gay cords and ribbons.  But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa of that sort whatever, and no tiller at all.  High times indeed, if whaling captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen in patent chairs.  And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete boat’s crew must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion, and the captain, having no place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all standing like a pine tree.  And often you will notice that being conscious of the eyes of the whole visible world resting on him from the sides