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[59] chapter 9 Rio, the Horn, and the In-Shore Ground When we arrived in Rio we lay there quite a while, A-fixing up our rigging and bending our new sails. From ship to ship they cheered us as we did sail along, And they wished us pleasant weather while rounding of Cape Horn. —from “The Girls Around Cape Horn,” forecastle song On her seventieth day out, Saturday, March 13, 1841, the Acushnet passed between bold and precipitous barriers flanking the narrow entrance to the Bay of Botafoga.She worked her way into the beautiful sheet of water that fills an oval basin 30 miles long and 15 miles wide and came to anchor in the harbor of Rio de Janeiro.This may have been her first port since leaving Fairhaven.1 In the harbor the Acushnet found another American whaler, the Henry of Stonington, Captain G. Pendleton, a far from lucky ship. It had put into port in distress five days before with a cargo valued at $1,000; it was condemned and sold. Also in port were eight American merchant vessels, one of which, the brig Tweed of Baltimore, Captain John Roberts, was going to do business with the Acushnet.2 Captain Roberts and Captain Pease made an agreement that the Tweed, which was loading a $75,000 cargo of coffee, should also transport back the 150 barrels of sperm oil taken to date by the Acushnet.3 If there was any liberty in town for the crew, it must have been brief and unsatisfactory; sightseeing of picturesque Rio was done from the deck. At least one boat crew must have gone ashore, for Captain Pease was rowed in so that he could announce his arrival to United States Consul George W. Slacum, deposit his ship’s papers and a copy of his roll of equipage and registry ,4 and carry out other business customary in a foreign port.There is no way of knowing if Melville was part of that boat crew or of any other that went ashore; we do know that in Omoo he speaks of “an old man-of-war’s-man, whose acquaintance I had made in Rio de Janeiro, at which place touched the ship in which I sailed from home” (1:6). If Melville did not get ashore, he must have chafed at not being able to explore the city as he had explored Liverpool in 1839 when the St. Lawrence was unloading cargo. [60]   Herman Melville’s Whaling Years How the Acushnet’s men reacted to the trans-shipping of their sperm oil is not known. Trans-shipping was common practice in the whale fishery and not always accepted with equanimity by crews. Some of the Acushnet’s people may have been apprehensive that such an arrangement portended an interminable voyage, one in which a take of oil was no sooner stowed down than it was shipped home in another vessel. Instead of filling their ship and returning home with it in a reasonable amount of time, the crew may have imagined themselves, in the most absurd scenario, spending the rest of their lives at sea and never filling the ship but sending home over and over again the makings of a whopping profit for the ship’s owners. In 1843 the crew of the whaler York of Edgartown, commanded by another Captain Pease, took exception when 500 barrels of oil were transferred to a homeward-bound craft; they insisted that they be discharged from the York or that the oil,which they felt rightly belonged to them, be returned aboard.5 Captain Valentine Pease’s pleasure in the luck of the voyage and his optimism in sending home the oil taken would have been considerably altered if he had known that the price of sperm oil, which had been $1.05 per gallon when he sailed, would drop to as low as 80 cents before the Tweed reached the United States.6 On Monday, March 15, the Acushnet was “cleared for Whaling Voyage,”7 for a Cape Horn passage, and for nearly four years of cruising the waters of the Pacific Ocean. A week later the Acushnet was 480 nautical miles south and slightly to the west of Rio de Janeiro, approximately 240 miles due east of Lagoda dos Patos, and 200 miles southeast of Cape St. Martha Grande.8 During the last week of March the weather had become menacing: the ship’s log recorded: “rugged,” “squally...

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