I spent several years at sea back in the 80s. I look back on it now and I think I must have been insane to have done it. Sailing a tin can out on the ocean for weeks at a time incessantly rocking port and starboard for days and days with no let up. Sailing right smack dab through storms that tosses your ship around like a cork in a bathtub. Sleeping in a little cubbyhole so small that you can't sit up. Getting woken up seasick at 3:30 in the morning to go take the watch in 15 minutes.

And as insane as that was, it was nothing compared the old days of whaling. Imagine being in this tiny whaleboat and you have to spear this gigantic thrashing mountain of blubber and muscle and let him drag you around until he's tired out and then you have to dig a barb into his ribs to try and pierce his heart and kill him because there's no way you can tow him back to the ship unless he's dead--and the ship is LOOOOOONG out of sight, miles and miles amd miles away somewhere. You'll have row your way back to it stroke by stroke by stroke while towing a 60-ton piece of meat and fat at a whopping mile per hour.

They say some guys threw themselves overboard and tried to swim away because the whale was so huge and powerful they were terrified it would kill them all. Many times, the whale did capsize the boat and you had to lose the whale and get your boat upright and get back inside before the sharks got there. They say piercing the whale for the coup de grace was the worst part. It thrashed and leapt and rolled and slapped its tail while spouting gouts of blood and vomiting up a ton of squid--all of which attracted the sharks. They called this death flurry. You had to get that whale back to the ship before the sharks finished it off. You had to get the sperm oil and blubber and bone--it was the gold of the whaling nations. The more the sharks got, the less money you made.

A whaleman was a sharecropper at sea. He was given a "lay" which was his portion of the take after being at sea 3 or 4 years thousands of miles from home. Usually it was miniscule. Anything he had to use or wear was charged to him and had to be worked off. Needless to say, after the voyage he usually ended up owing and would be obliged to sign up for another voyage. I read about one guy sailing on the same whaler out of Greenland for 55 years!!! I'm not even 55 years old yet!

You had to sleep up front in the hold as a regular sailor. It was dark and dank. In the tropics, it was also hot and sweaty. The only light was provided by glass prisms installed in the weather deck and let in and diffused the light just enough that you could see your rack. If a sail or some gear was laid over it--too bad, you had no light whatsoever.

The food ranged from bad to downright revolting. Megellan reported in his diaries when his crew was searching for the straits that now bear his name that they were sorely in need of taking on stores--that the crew had been reduced eating oatmeal soaked in rat urine and mixed with rat feces. Either that or starve because there was nothing else to eat until they could find stores. And they ate it. I keep picturing an old Dana Carvey dreassed like a sailor yelling, "AND WE LIKED IT!!! WE LIKED IT!!!!!"