"Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren
ground, ling, heath, broom, furze, anything," except this wearisome
monotonous waste of water! Let Kamchatka be what it will, we shall
welcome it with as much joy as that with which Columbus first saw the
flowery coast of San Salvador. I am prepared to look with complacency
upon a sandbar and two spears of grass, and would not even insist upon
the grass if I could only be sure of the sand-bar. We have now been
thirty-four days at sea without once meeting a sail or getting a
glimpse of land.

Our chief amusement lately has been the discussion of controverted
points of history and science, and wonderful is the forensic and
argumentative ability which these debates have developed. They are
getting to be positively interesting. The only drawback to them is,
that in the absence of any decisive authority they never come to any
satisfactory conclusion. We have now been discussing for sixteen days
the uses of a whale's blow-holes; and I firmly believe that if our
voyage were prolonged, like the Flying Dutchman's, to all eternity, we
should never reach any solution of the problem that would satisfy all
the disputants. The captain has an old Dutch _History of the World_,
in twenty-six folio volumes, to which he appeals as final authority in
all questions under the heavens, whether pertaining to love, science,
war, art, politics, or religion; and no sooner does he get cornered in
a discussion than he entrenches himself behind these ponderous folios,
and keeps up a hot fire of terrific Dutch polysyllables until we are
ready to make an unconditional surrender. If we venture to suggest
a doubt as to the intimacy of the connection between a whale's
blow-holes and the _History of the World_, he comes down upon us with
the most withering denunciations as wrongheaded sceptics who won't