Moby Dick

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in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country
where the convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil.

The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those
polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that
climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch 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 southern fishery, beer would