212 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



monumental belches, may be heard for a considerable distance. That 

 they should suffer from peptic ulcers and thereby provide us with 

 one of the four most valuable fixatives for our highest-priced 

 perfumes is somehow strangely grotesque. Ambergris once fetched 

 a price of $400 per ounce; its price at the time of writing was still $8. 



Exactly how valuable this first sperm whale was to the Nantucket- 

 ers is not, as far as can be ascertained, anywhere recorded, but Cap- 

 tain Hussey's little effort seems to have created more than just a stir. 

 We find the whole island going deliberately and wittingly into the 

 sperming business. As a matter of fact, the right whales had by that 

 date declined almost to a point of extinction along the inshore waters 

 of the New England coast, and several of the ports, with Nantucket 

 in the lead, had begun to build larger boats and to take longer voyages 

 farther offshore in pursuit of those whales that migrated north and 

 south far out by the inner edge of the Gulf Stream. These vessels 

 varied in size between fifteen and forty feet, and were rigged as 

 sloops. Many were just glorified rowboats, without decking and set- 

 ting only a single lateen sail. Others carried a gaff-rigged mainsail 

 and a standing jib. The largest appear to have carried a jib from a 

 short bowsprit, a staysail, and a mainsail, and they were decked, but 

 had a large, open cockpit, while a wheel replaced a tiller. The first 

 ocean-going sloop was built in Nantucket in 1694. At the time of 

 Captain Hussey's epic, there were still only five out of the island, the 

 larger fitted out for five- to seven-week cruises at sea. 



The build-up of the ocean-going fleet began in earnest the very 

 next year, though offshore whaling continued with small, open boats, 

 so that a total of eighty-six whales was still taken by this means by 

 twenty-eight boats in 1726. Meantime the larger sloops had increased 

 in number to twenty-five, and in 1730 this fleet sold a total of ;f 3200 

 worth of oil, a sum that would represent about $ 1 50,000 today. What 

 is more, this bold little fleet had by then reached not only Greenland, 

 but the north coast of Brazil. The sloops were of thirty to fifty tons, 

 and in the year 1730 the first schooner of seventy tons was launched. 

 The practice was for the whalers to fit out during winter, then go 

 south in the spring — first to the Carolina coast, thence via the Ba- 

 hamas either into the Gulf and the Caribbean or down the outside of 

 the West Indies, then east to the Azores, from there to the Cape 

 Verdes and the west coast of Africa. Later the voyages were ex- 



