They were not less astonished than delighted at his reappearance; he had been numbered with the dead.  But his love still seemed strangely coy; willing, but yet somehow mysteriously withheld.  The old intrigues were still on foot.  Israel soon discovered, that though rejoiced to welcome the return of the prodigal son—­so some called him—­his father still remained inflexibly determined against the match, and still inexplicably countermined his wooing.  With a dolorous heart he mildly yielded to what seemed his fatality; and more intrepid in facing peril for himself, than in endangering others by maintaining his rights (for he was now one-and-twenty), resolved once more to retreat, and quit his blue hills for the bluer billows.

A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed.  The ocean brims with natural griefs and tragedies; and into that watery immensity of terror, man’s private grief is lost like a drop.

Travelling on foot to Providence, Rhode Island, Israel shipped on board a sloop, bound with lime to the West Indies.  On the tenth day out, the vessel caught fire, from water communicating with the lime.  It was impossible to extinguish the flames.  The boat was hoisted out, but owing to long exposure to the sun, it needed continual bailing to keep it afloat.  They had only time to put in a firkin of butter and a ten-gallon keg of water.  Eight in number, the crew entrusted themselves to the waves, in a leaky tub, many leagues from land.  As the boat swept under the burning bowsprit, Israel caught at a fragment of the flying-jib, which sail had fallen down the stay, owing to the charring, nigh the deck, of the rope which hoisted it.  Tanned with the smoke, and its edge blackened with the fire, this bit of canvass helped them bravely on their way.  Thanks to kind Providence, on the second day they were picked up by a Dutch ship, bound from Eustatia to Holland.  The castaways were humanely received, and supplied with every necessary.  At the end of a week, while unsophisticated Israel was sitting in the maintop, thinking what should befall him in Holland, and wondering what sort of unsettled, wild country it was, and whether there was any deer-shooting or beaver-trapping there, lo! an American brig, bound from Piscataqua to Antigua, comes in sight.  The American took them aboard, and conveyed them safely to her port.  There Israel shipped for Porto Rico; from thence, sailed to Eustatia.

Other rovings ensued; until at last, entering on board a Nantucket ship, he hunted the leviathan off the Western Islands and on the coast of Africa, for sixteen months; returning at length to Nantucket with a brimming hold.  From that island he sailed again on another whaling voyage, extending, this time, into the great South Sea.  There, promoted to be harpooner, Israel, whose eye and arm had been so improved by practice with his gun in the wilderness, now further intensified his aim, by darting the whale-lance; still, unwittingly, preparing himself for the Bunker Hill rifle.