In 1873, 21-year-old Sam Williams embarked on a whaling journey on the two-masted F.H. Moore--he steered one of the boats and threw the harpoon. He kept a personal log and reworked it into this never-before-published manuscript, now supplemented by additional research and relevant excerpts of the ship's official logbook.

Complementing this are excerpts from three other accounts of whaling voyages: Incidents of a Whaling Voyage by Francis Allyn Olmstead (1841); Etchings of a Whaling Cruise by J. Ross Browne (1846), an expose of the whaling industry; and The Gam: Being a Group of Whaling Stories by Capt. Charles Henry Robbins (1899), a personal story of nearly an entire life at sea. The four accounts open the 19th century world of whaling to modern readers in a realistic and unromantic way.