Among other talk to-day, it came out that whale-ships carry no doctor.
The captain adds the doctorship to his own duties. He not only gives
medicines, but sets broken limbs after notions of his own, or saws them
off and sears the stump when amputation seems best. The captain is
provided with a medicine-chest, with the medicines numbered instead of
named. A book of directions goes with this. It describes diseases and
symptoms, and says, "Give a teaspoonful of No. 9 once an hour," or "Give
ten grains of No. 12 every half-hour," etc. One of our sea-captains came
across a skipper in the North Pacific who was in a state of great
surprise and perplexity. Said he:

"There's something rotten about this medicine-chest business. One of my
men was sick--nothing much the matter. I looked in the book: it said
give him a teaspoonful of No. 15. I went to the medicine-chest, and I
see I was out of No. 15. I judged I'd got to get up a combination
somehow that would fill the bill; so I hove into the fellow half a
teaspoonful of No. 8 and half a teaspoonful of No. 7, and I'll be hanged
if it didn't kill him in fifteen minutes! There's something about this
medicine-chest system that's too many for me!"

There was a good deal of pleasant gossip about old Captain "Hurricane"
Jones, of the Pacific Ocean--peace to his ashes! Two or three of us
present had known him; I particularly well, for I had made four
sea-voyages with him. He was a very remarkable man. He was born in a
ship; he picked up what little education he had among his shipmates;
he began life in the forecastle, and climbed grade by grade to the
captaincy. More than fifty years of his sixty-five were spent at sea.
He had sailed all oceans, seen all lands, and borrowed a tint from all
climates. When a man has been fifty years at sea he necessarily knows