Captain Fuller served fifty years after the Civil War in the New London branch of the whaling industry that hunted elephant seals at Kerguelen (Desolation) Island in the Indian Ocean. One of the two voyages described here ended in shipwreck, with Fuller and his bickering crew stranded on Desolation Island for eleven months.With the editor's detailed introduction and annotations to put it in perspective, Fuller's memoir is an exciting story of the sea and a valuable study of the economic and social conditions of a sweated industry in its declining years. Now in the G.W. Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport, Fuller's manuscript is here published for the first time.