THE 

 AMERICAN WHALEMAN 



CHAPTER I 

 BEARINGS 



AMERICAN whaling as a significant industry van- 

 ished with the coming of the twentieth century. 

 In the record of national economic and maritime 

 development it is a closed chapter. The typical 

 "blubber-hunter" — broad on the beam, bluff-bowed, square- 

 rigged, and resembling, on dark nights when the try-pot fires 

 were burning, a miniature floating inferno — has disappeared 

 from the seas. With look-outs perched precariously at her 

 mast-heads and with three or four whaleboats swinging con- 

 spicuously from her davits, she no longer excites the curiosity 

 of ocean travelers or the derision of merchant seamen. The 

 ports which sent such whalers to the ends of the earth have 

 only fading memories of voyages which brought much of 

 the colorful and of the exotic to the shores of provincial New 

 England. Whaling products in part have outlived the uses 

 to which they were put, and in part have been supplanted by 

 satisfactory substitutes. And the whaleman is a figure for- 

 gotten or remembered only in retrospect, along with the pe- 

 culiar factors of his onerous and ill-starred occupation. 



But such a characterization applies only to the present and 

 to the recent past. For as the eighteenth century witnessed 

 the gradual rise and hesitant expansion of American whaling, 

 and as the twentieth century has seen its extinction, so the inter- 

 vening period marked its greatest growth and highest develop- 



