Mizzle was prematurely bald--being quite a young man--and
when questioned on the subject, he usually attributed it to the fact of
his having been so long employed about the cooking coppers, that the
excessive heat to which he was exposed had stewed all the hair off his
head! The crew was made up of stout, active men in the prime of life,
nearly all of whom had been more or less accustomed to the
whale-fishing, and some of the harpooners were giants in muscular
development and breadth of shoulder, if not in height.
Chief among these harpooners was Amos Parr, a short, thick-set, powerful
man of about thirty-five, who had been at sea since he was a little boy,
and had served in the fisheries of both the Northern and Southern Seas.
No one knew what country had the honour of producing him--indeed, he was
ignorant of that point himself; for, although he had vivid recollections
of his childhood having been spent among green hills, and trees, and
streamlets, he was sent to sea with a strange captain before he was old
enough to care about the name of his native land. Afterwards he ran away
from his ship, and so lost all chance of ever discovering who he was;
but, as he sometimes remarked, he didn't much care who he was, so long
as he was _himself_; so it didn't matter. From a slight peculiarity in
his accent, and other qualities, it was surmised that he must be an
Irishman--a supposition which he rather encouraged, being partial to the
sons, and particularly partial to the daughters, of the Emerald Isle,
one of which last he had married just six months before setting out on
this whaling expedition.
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