46 THE AMERICAN WHALEMAN 



Those were the full, gala days of the industry, — when 

 rugged New Bedford, in particular, was at the peak of a pic- 

 turesque, salt-sprayed renown which took her name out into 

 the seven seas. This New England town, which became the 

 greatest whaling port in the world despite population figures 

 which were unimpressive even in an era of villages, learned 

 to blend the strange and exotic with the native and homely in 

 a manner both alluring and ludricrous. 



New Bedford knew bearded and tattooed harpooners who 

 sea-legged their way into brothels and grog-shops j timid and 

 unsophisticated green hands from the farms of the interior j 

 veteran tars who knew the price of a harlot in Zanzibar and 

 the cost of ale in London j mutineers and masters who should 

 have been slave-drivers j sperm oil from the Seychelles Is- 

 lands and whalebone from Kamchatka; barnacles acquired 

 in every one of the seven seasj scrimshaw work and Chinese 

 tea, Oriental silk and souvenirs from the Fiji Islands; bo- 

 nanza voyages and penniless hands; log-books telling of stove 

 boats and account-books telling of exorbitant charges; rope- 

 walks and sail-lofts, outfitters and ship-chandlers; Quaker 

 and Cape Verde half-breed, Puritan and Kanaka; pure sperm 

 oil which had been baled out of the head of a cachalot and 

 black and stinking whale oil which had been four years at 

 sea; stories of murder and of rape in the South Seas; yarns 

 of cheap love in Paita and of frozen noses in the Sea of 

 Okhotsk; Seamen's Bethel and dens of drunken vice; count- 

 ing-houses with high stools and lays of 1/200 of the net pro- 

 ceeds; toggle harpoons and tubs filled with coiled whaleline; 

 nauseating forecastles and the spacious lawns of the leading 

 whaling merchants; "lobscouse" and "duff," ship's bread 

 filled with worms and salt-horse which had thrice crossed the 

 equator ! 



Cosmopolitan and provincial, of the great outlying world 

 and of pinched New England, pious and abandoned, aesthetic 

 and ugly, alluring and repulsive, colorful and drab, adventu- 

 rous and cautious, courting danger and loving security — such 



buck, however, gathered other statistical material which carried the figures 

 for annual imports and for average prices back to 1804. This material was 

 published in his "History of the American Whale Fishery," pp. 660 f. 



