PART II 

 FULL SAIL 



CHAPTER V 

 FORECASTLE AND CABIN 



THE human material entering into the crews 

 changed slowly but radically during the very mid- 

 dle of American whaling development. So grad- 

 ual was this change that it is impossible to assign it 

 to any given year. Yet so unmistakable was it, too, that the 

 industry was divided into two roughly defined but clearly 

 recognizable periods. For want of a more precise boundary 

 line these two may be separated by the half -decade 1825- 

 1830. Before that time the crews were provincial and homo- 

 geneous: after 1830 they were cosmopolitan and heterogene- 

 ous. The early foremast hands were made up largely of Yan- 

 kees from the New England seaboard, with an admixture of 

 Gay Head Indians and a small representative of negroes j while 

 during the second period individuals from every race and from 

 a score of nationalities rubbed shoulders in the crowded fore- 

 castles and steerages. Coincident with this shift from pro- 

 vincialism to cosmopolitanism went a marked deterioration in 

 skill, experience, efficiency, and morale, as well as a striking 

 increase in the total number of men engaged in the fishery. 

 The earlier period saw the whaling industry virtually mo- 

 nopolized by native American stock, with the Yankee of the 

 New England seaboard as the dominant type. The small 

 whaling villages were concentrated on Long Island, Martha^s 

 Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Massachusetts mainland j and 



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