Annie never spoke of the whales, which said it all. She hated it, but could not resist telling her grandchildren astounding bedtime stories. Slaughter and Death was not their subject, but these little girls knew it to have been the object, and thus their famous senses of humor were forged.

 

Cabin fever was the constant: she was dead bored, she remembered only sewing and reading the bible for schooling. Being dead bored, with bouts of terror.... Annie  and the laboring crew had the worst cabin fever as neither could leave ship unless they were at large harbors. Annie  was too at risk, they would desert. In the voyage after she left, some of the 'already sick' crews' longing for fresh food, would cause them to desert, cause a fire in the hold, and be meted out Chase's violent punishment  (of which we believe she heard many a strike & cry of when she was there). In all her time among the south Pacific islands, she never partook of their felicities and ferment. 

 

Still, her cabin took her to where she could sense the tropics, glimpse wild things, be surrounded by global aesthetics, experience relief and awe and fear rolled into one as when she heard the beat of African drums off the coast of Africa having been blown there by a hurricane. The globe-sized infinity signs the whales made from south to north to south to north on every ocean, and the ships that followed them was a form of constance amid change.  Some of her fellow entrapped sailors came from lands where spiritual observances were embedded in their words, actions, and things, even the scrimshawed toys they made her. She came of a curious age, on the ship with them, but lived her first fifteen years in approximations of whatever was being worn at the time. During a gam, where the latest fashions might be learned of, by the glint in the candle light of the rubies in the eyes of a snake in a gold ring on the finger of another Captain's wife, in their own family's cabin, in their whaling boat, in the middle of the ocean... She adored such gleams and glints. All the sadder that the cask of opals her father and mother bought with their retirement moneys were forced overboard on pain of greater mutiny. We girls miss them still.