Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: he whale(s) on me?

I've just decided to write something in English everyday or at least every weekend, in order to improve my writing skills. I am reading the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and it's a very long story compared to The Man who would be King that I read sometime ago. But the problem I have with Twain's book is concerning the speech and improper grammar used by the characters which sometimes leaves me confused. Huck and the slave Jim are always using strange words and improper English. I must to be careful with these words and speech while trying to build my vocabulary.
Yesterday I found a verb used by the author that I can't find a meaning for. Huckleberry said of his father: "He used to always whale me when he as sober and could get his hand on me". So, I looked for this word in two dictionaries, but I couldn't find a reasonably meaning. What does he mean by "he whale me"?

Someone taught me:
To whale on something is to beat or whip severely, and Huck should say He whales on me.

What do you think? The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is proper to foreign students?

Why do you obey the rules?

In Brazil, I think the laws are very strict, although people are always complaining about them, and arguing that they are very lax. For example, talking about driving accidents, there are many fatal accidents here (in Brazil), but they are more caused by imprudence and negligence than the absence of laws or lenient ones. In my opinion just the fact that you are afraid to go to jail or have a fine is not an essential condition to make you obey the rules. The effectiveness of the law is much more than its punishment nature, it is concerned about education and the way people internalize the principles, rules and regulations as their own.
What do you think about?

My experience with volcano eruption - Cape Verde

In 1995, I was finishing High School, when the Fogo volcano erupted on Cape Verde Island. Well, I wasn't on Fogo Island when the eruption began, I was living in Praia, my hometown and the capital of Cape Verde in Santiago Island, which is neighbors Fogo.

It was remarkable because the eruption started after twenty years of inactivity and everybody had believed that that the volcano was extinct. Fortunately, rescue workers and the military did a great job, and nobody was killed. International aids and donations also came in time, and people were evacuated from their homes to temporary accommodations buildings constructed for that purpose.

In Santiago Island we could see the huge smoke that was expelled out from the volcano, and everything we watched on TV was amazing, even though we were all terrified by the phenomenon. The air was very thick and from time to time we could feel the ground trembling, just a small earthquake, but enough to make all of us pray to God for our lives. Last year, this experience cross my mind again, when I heard that another eruption had began, and they said it is stronger than the eruption that occurred in 1995.

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until next post,
and I am still waiting you to talk by Skype and teach each other Portuguese and English, French, Swedish, or other language you speak and want to learn Portuguese. Just send an e-mail.

Learning Portuguese

Notes from an English/Portuguese Course

Nowadays, more and more people are learning Portuguese. I think that in the past, most of them believed that it was more useful to learn Spanish, and this misconception, that you can either speak Portuguese when you learn Spanish, kept some people away from Portuguese. But today is different. It's true that both are Ibero-Romance languages and very close, and learning one help with the other, but they're still two different languages.
So, I've got the idea to put down some notes of mine as I study English, and help those are learning Portuguese (as well as Portuguese speakers who are learning English). I am reading an old book called "Método de Ahn Reformado" by M. H. D'Espiney and I'll bring some notes took from it.

So, what is the equivalent for "caderno" in English?

I found the sentence bellow in the book (to translate to Portuguese):
Your book was more useful than his copy-book
And I noticed in the book-vocabulary that "copy-book" was matched with "caderno" in Portuguese. So the intention of the book was the reader/student to translate the sentence like this: "O seu livro foi mais útil do que o caderno dele / seu caderno".

But "copy-book" really means "caderno"?

According to Oxford Dictionary copybook (noun) is a book (livro), used in the past by children in school, containing examples of writing which school students had to copy. Thus it is something near to "caderno de anotações" or "livro/caderno de exercícios", but maybe in a old-fashioned use.

Pairing the sentences:
Your book was more useful than his copy-book = O seu livro foi mais útl do que o caderno dele.
Better is: "O seu livro foi mais útil do que o livro de exercícios dele".

But if I want to say - Portuguese into English:
O teu livro foi mais útil do que o caderno dele => Your book was more useful than his notebook.
Notebook (noun) is a book of paper (caderno) for writing on: She put everything down in her notebook.

In some (not so good) English-Portuguese dictionaries you also find scrapbook as "caderno de rascunhos", something close to a draft notebook. However, as I found again in the Dictionary:
Scrapbook [noun, C] is a book with empty pages where you can stick newspapers articles, pictures, etc. that you have collected and want to keep. In Portuguese: albúm de recortes.

The pair words:

Notebook = caderno
Copybook = (antigo) livro/caderno de exercícios
Scrapbook = albúm de recortes.   

And you, what do you think about?