Dick Sands, the Boy Captain

I

On the 2nd of February, 1873, the Pilgrim, a tight little craft of 400 tons burden, lay in lat. 43° 57′, S. and long. 165° 19′, W. She was a schooner, the property of James W. Weldon, a wealthy Californian shipowner who had fitted her out at San Francisco, expressly for the whale-fisheries in the southern seas.

James Weldon was accustomed every season to send his whalers both to the Arctic regions beyond Bering Straits, and to the Antarctic Ocean below Tasmania and Cape Horn; and the Pilgrim, although one of the smallest, was one of the best-going vessels of its class; her sailing-powers were splendid, and her rigging was so adroitly adapted that with a very small crew she might venture without risk within sight of the impenetrable ice-fields of the southern hemisphere: under skilful guidance she could dauntlessly thread her way amongst the drifting icebergs that, lessened though they were by perpetual shocks and undermined by warm currents, made their way northwards as far as the parallel of New Zealand or the Cape of Good Hope, to a latitude corresponding to which in the northern hemisphere they are never seen, having already melted away in the depths of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.