PART III 

 DERELICT 



CHAPTER XIII 



CIVIL WAR, PETROLEUM, AND THE 

 ARCTIC 



THE apogee of American whaling was clearly marked 

 by the decade 1 850-1 860. With the Civil War 

 came a group of forces which relentlessly tore 

 down the structure of prosperity erected after 

 1830. Some of these forces struck sudden blows at the 

 fishery J others worked slowly and cumulatively. But all were 

 destructive J and following their ravages, whaling activities en- 

 tered upon a period of decline which passed gradually into 

 irretrievable ruin and ultimately into virtual extinction. 



Foremost among the proximate causes of decay was the loss 

 of tonnage due to the Civil War and to the Arctic. The years 

 of hostilities brought to the whalemen captures and burnings 

 by the Confederate cruisers Alabama and Shenandoah; trans- 

 fers to foreign flags and to the merchant service j vessels which 

 rotted at their wharves instead of sailing the high seasj and a 

 heavy sacrifice of tonnage, if not of money, in the form of the 

 "Great Stone Fleet" of forty whalers which was sunk in an 

 effort to blockade Charleston and Savannah harbors. And 

 soon after the wreckage of war came the exactions of the Arctic. 

 In 1 871 thirty-three vessels were crushed in the ice off Point 

 Belcher; while in 1876 twelve more whalers were destroyed by 

 the ice-locked waters of the far north. 



But physical losses, no matter how heavy, cannot bring about 

 the permanent ruin of an entire industry without simultaneous 



sapping of recuperative power. American whaling, in par- 



289 



