ONE:At the advertised time the three strangers went on board the steamer that was to carry them up the river, and took possession of the cabins assigned to them. Their only fellow-passengers were some Chinese merchants on their way to Nanking, and a consular clerk at one of the British consulates along the stream. The captain of the steamer was a jolly New-Yorker, who had an inexhaustible fund of stories, which he was never tired of telling. Though he told dozens of them daily, Frank remarked that he was not like history, for he never repeated himself. Fred remembered that some one had said to him in Japan that he would be certain of a pleasant voyage on the Yang-tse-kiang if he happened to fall in with Captain Paul on the steamer Kiang-ching. Fortune had favored him, and he had found the steamer and the captain he desired.
TWO:"We don't reckon whales by their length," Captain Spofford answered, "but by the number of barrels of oil they make. Ask any old captain how long the largest whale was that he ever took, and the chances are he'll begin to estimate by the length of his ship, and frankly tell you he never measured one. I measured the largest sperm-whale I ever took, and found him seventy-nine feet long; he made a hundred and seven barrels of oil. Here's the figures of him: nose to neck, twenty-six feet; neck to hump, twenty-nine feet; hump to tail, seventeen feet; tail, seven feet. His tail was sixteen feet across, and he was forty-one feet six inches around the body. He had fifty-one teeth, and the heaviest weighed twenty-five ounces. We took nineteen barrels of oil from his case, the inside of the head, where we dipped it out with a bucket. I know one captain that captured a sperm-whale ninety feet long, that made a hundred and thirty-seven barrels, and there was another sperm taken by the ship Monka, of New Bedford, that made a hundred and forty-five barrels. I don't know how long he was.
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