Page:Dick Sands the Boy Captain.djvu/15

 DICK SANDS, THE BOY CAPTAIN. CHAPTER I. THE "PILORI M." On the 2nd of February, 1873, the " Pilgrim," a tîg^ht little craft of 4CX) 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 Califomian ship-owner who had fitted her out at San Francisco, expressly for the whale- fisherîes in the southern seas. James Weldon was accustomed every season to send his whalers both to the Arctic régions beyond Behring Straits, and to the Antarctic Océan below Tasmania and Cape Hom ; and the "Pilgrim," although one of the smallest, was one of the best-going vessels of its class ; her sailing- powers were splcndid, and her rigging was so adroitly adapted that with a very small crew she might venture without risk within sight of the impénétrable ice-fields of the southern hémisphère : undcr skilful guidance she could dauntlessly thread her way amongst the drifting ice-bergs that, lessened though they were by perpétuai shocks and undermined by warm currents, made their way north- wards as far as the parallel of New Zealand or the Cape of Good Hope, to a latitude corresponding to which in the northem hémisphère they are never seen, having already melted away in the depths of the Atlantic and Pacific Océans.