300 THE AMERICAN WHALEMAN 



have been matched by the whaling industry even in its palm- 

 iest days. Neither new capital nor lusty young manhood could 

 be induced to go into whaling when one of the richest land 

 areas of the world lay at their doors and promised untold 

 wealth to those who could harness it. Even New England, 

 far from the tempting prairies and mines of the West, found 

 in the cotton mill a substitute for harpoon and whaleboat. To 

 many an old whaleman it must have seemed little short of an 

 outrage when New Bedford herself, suckled and grown strong 

 on oil and bone, denied further capital to her battered old 

 whalers and poured her savings into cotton mills. Great, tall 

 smokestacks, symbols of a newer industry and of greater prof- 

 its, came to dwarf and replace the sturdy masts and yards which 

 had seen Cape Horn and Java Head times without number 

 and which had weathered the shrieking gales of both the North 

 Atlantic and the South Pacific. New capital ignored the de- 

 mands and needs of whaling, now obviously senescent, and 

 flowed into manufacturing, mining, farming, and commerce j 

 and even old capital deserted the rapidly thinning ranks of the 

 whaleships whenever opportunity offered. Consequently the 

 victims of decay, shipwreck, fire, reef, shoal, and Arctic ice, 

 once gone, could never be replaced. 



But capital was not the only truant j for men, especially those 

 of character and of ability, were also deserting the industry in 

 large numbers. More and more the intelligent and ambitious 

 young American refused to go to sea, even in New England, 

 and least of all on a whaler. This drift away from the sea 

 began as early as the thirties, was greatly accelerated during the 

 fifties by the lure of California gold, and was completed dur- 

 ing the halcyon days of internal development which followed 

 the Civil War. And as the better types of Americans forsook 

 the forecastles, their bunks were filled by criminal or lascivious 

 adventurers, by a motley collection of South Sea Islanders 

 known as Kanakas, by cross-breed negroes and Portuguese from 

 the Azores and the Cape Verdes, and by the outcasts and rene- 

 gades from all the merchant services of both the Old World 

 and the New. This extraordinary mixture of races, nationali- 

 ties, and types had also characterized the fishery, it is true, 

 throughout the forties and fifties. But after 1865 the dilu- 



