CIVIL WAR, PETROLEUM, AND ARCTIC 297 



But if demand was increasingly disappointing, supply was 

 no less so. Indications that the whales were either more shy, 

 or more scarce, or both, multiplied everywhere. Even the old 

 reliable whaling grounds were showing unmistakable signs of 

 exhaustion. More and more frequently individual vessels 

 would spend weeks on the best whaling grounds, in the very 

 midst of the season, without a single capture. The constant, 

 desperate searches for new and fertile grounds found added 

 perils and hardships rather than increased production. A "full 

 ship" became a goal so difficult, so elusive and fickle, and so 

 long postponed, that it seemed a mirage, leading its followers 

 through month after month and across mile after mile of fruit- 

 less effort. The average length of voyage increased alarm- 

 ingly, and seemed destined to grow until it had converted the 

 whalemen into modern Rip Van Winkles who worked and 

 searched, instead of sleeping, while time passed them by, and 

 finally brought them back, near strangers, to a changing world. 

 Only the Arctic continued to afford a reasonable opportunity 

 for finding whales in large numbers j and every season the 

 masters of the right whalers were tempted to challenge a gray 

 death by entering the frigid zone earlier, by penetrating farther 

 and farther north, and by remaining later. 



This growing difficulty in finding whales, rather than in 

 capturing them after they had been sighted, naturally led to 

 much speculation and to many surmises. Had the whaling 

 population of the world's waters been decimated by the long 

 years of slaughter? Or had even these greatest of all living 

 creatures condescended to become shy and wary? L^nfortu- 

 nately there was (and is) no conclusive answer. Certain cal- 

 culations concerning the mortality rate among several species 

 of whales, however, were too interesting and too significant to 

 be ignored. They were mere estimates, it is true; but they 

 were erected upon a basis of known facts, and had some claim 

 to validity. 



For the period 1835 to 1872, inclusive, the average num- 

 ber of vessels employed annually in American whaling was 

 524. This fleet captured annually an average of 96,625 bar- 

 rels of sperm oil and 172,448 barrels of whale oil. Taking 

 25 barrels as the average yield of a sperm whale, the number 



