3o6 THE AMERICAN WHALEMAN 



go her anchor in the harbor, the final cargo of oil had arrived. 

 Yet less than thirty years before, in 1842, Nantucket had been 

 at the zenith of her career with a fleet of 36,000 tons! 



This relatively early demise of whaling on the island was 

 due both to the misfortunes which were then afflicting the en- 

 tire industry and to certain factors peculiar to Nantucket. 

 One self-imposed handicap lay in the traditional preference 

 for sperm oil and the consequent refusal to take up Arctic right 

 and bowhead whaling, though the latter branches of the fishery 

 had proved more lucrative. The drain of manpower to the 

 California gold mines which took place during the fifties was 

 much more difficult to replace in a small island community like 

 Nantucket than on the mainland. And a great fire which swept 

 the town in 1846 may have had some effect in lessening its 

 recuperative powers. 



But the most obvious difficulty, and the one to which the in- 

 habitants attributed many of their woes, was a sand-bar which 

 prevented deep-draught vessels from coming into port. Rela- 

 tively small vessels could be floated over the bar without dif- 

 ficulty 3 but entering the harbor was a precarious matter for 

 larger craft. Attempts to secure the opening of an adequate 

 channel were made repeatedly, but in vain. Congress, as 

 usual in such matters, was apathetic j and the task was too great 

 to be undertaken by the town itself. Consequently the bar 

 remained, and kept away (in the minds of the islanders, at 

 least) not only larger craft, but also much potential pros- 

 perity.* 



But the whole New England seaboard, for almost a century 

 the whaling headquarters of the world, was likewise doomed. 

 During the post-war years the whale fishery^s center of gravity 

 was shifting slowly but surely from Atlantic to Pacific. For 

 a time Honolulu was able to retain her time-honored supremacy 

 as a port for recruiting and refittingj but after 1880 the palm 

 passed to San Francisco. For some time the Golden Gate had 

 been a convenient base for operations in the North Pacific and 

 in the Arctic waters north of Behring Straits — the only re- 



* For further details regarding the dramatic decline of whaling at Nantucket 

 see Hussey and Robinson, "Catalogue of Nantucket Whalers, and Their Voyages 

 From 1815 to 1870"; and Douglas-Lithgow, R. A., "Nantucket: A History," 

 pp. 374 ff' 



