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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: whalemen, including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea,
did not much exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each
of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all;
therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for
a twelve weeks' allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that
550 ankers of gin. Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so
fuddled as one might fancy them to have been, were the right sort of
men to stand up in a boat's head, and take good aim at flying whales;
this would seem somewhat improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and
hit them too. But this was very far North, be it remembered, where
beer agrees well with the constitution; upon the Equator, in our
Moby Dick |
