BEARINGS 7 



long voyages which carried vessels and crews into remote har- 

 bors and over uncharted waters turned the whaleman into a 

 globe-trotter who often flaunted his sophistication in the faces 

 of provincial neighbors in his home port. The boarding- 

 houses and brothels of New Bedford and of Nantucket were 

 clamorous with men who had followed a compass from Bos- 

 ton Light to Cape Horn, Honolulu, and the Fiji Islands, or 

 from Zanzibar and Java Head to Shanghai, Spitzbergen, and 

 the Sea of Okhotsk. 



Whaling contributed more than its share, too, to the work 

 of maritime discovery. The constant effort to open up fresh 

 whaling grounds in unfrequented waters led to much matter- 

 of-fact exploration, unheralded but effective. American 

 whalers worked their curious, pioneering path into the North 

 and South Pacific, in particular, always alert for new fields for 

 operations J and certain islands in the South Seas still bear the 

 hardly tropical names of the Nantucket or New Bedford cap- 

 tains who discovered them. A report transmitted to the Sec- 

 retary of the Navy on September 24, 1828, gave a long and 

 impressive list of the islands, reefs, and shoals which had been 

 discovered by American whalemen or were scarcely known 

 outside of their ranks. The data used in drawing up this re- 

 port, which covered the Pacific, Indian, and "Chinese Oceans," 

 resulted wholly from examinations of whaling log-books, 

 journals, and charts, and from first-hand Interviews with the 

 masters and mates who had been responsible for the original 

 entries.'^ 



The world-traversing activity of whaling found its counter- 

 part in the character of the crews. Here were to be found 

 representatives of practically every race, nationality, class, 

 type, and temperament. Never in this country have there 

 been more thoroughly cosmopolitan, polyglot mixtures than 

 crowded into the teeming forecastles of mid-century whaling 

 vessels. Specimens of every nationality of Europe and of 

 dozens of South Sea Islands j ne'er-do-well sons of wealthy 

 American families, so popular in period novels j Cape Verde 



7^ This "Report on Islands Discovered by Whalers in the Pacific" was made 

 by J. N. Reynolds. It is contained in House Executive Documents III, No. 

 105, 2nd Session, 23rd Congress. 



