High Noon on the High Seas 213 



tended back across the Atlantic to the Brazilian coast and even south 

 to the Falklands. At first, however, the fleet returned to Nantucket 

 in July, refitted, and then sailed again for the Grand Banks to the 

 north. 



While the Nantucketers were thus engaged, the mainland ports 

 were building fleets with equal industry. Provincetown specialized 

 in the northern fishery and by 1737 she had a dozen hundred-ton ves- 

 sels trespassing upon the Dutch sea domains in Davis Strait, where 

 they sought the arctic right whales, which were still plentiful by the 

 ice fronts. New Bedford already had nearly a century of offshore 

 whaling behind it, Joseph Russell, the founder of the port, having 

 started the business in 1652, but it was 1755 before she sent four 

 sloops to the high seas. By 1775, incidentally, she had a fleet of eighty 

 large vessels engaged in whaling. One by one other ports got into the 

 business, all the way from Maine to Williamsburg in Virginia. But 

 all was not plain sailing, even in this first great phase of American 

 whaling and seamanship. 



The British were — as usual, one might almost say — at war with 

 the French and the Spanish, and privateers of both nations appeared 

 off the American coasts. The colonists seem to have given as good 

 as they had to take at the hands of these semiofficial sea rovers, but 

 they prudently decided to avoid the northern fishery and to concen- 

 trate on the southern, although the Grand Banks were still visited. 

 In 1748 the British fell prone to a sort of monstrous economic hic- 

 cups which prompted them, first, to offer a twenty-shilling bounty 

 for whaling in the Davis Strait, then, almost immediately (1755), to 

 place an embargo on any fishing by the colonists on the Grand Banks, 

 and, five years later, suddenly to throw the St. Lawrence and Belle 

 Isle grounds open to them. Next, they clamped a heavy duty on all 

 whale products but at the same time banned the colonists from selling 

 such products in any country other than Britain. 



Despite these irksome maneuvers, the colonists, led by the New 

 Englanders and with Nantucket in the forefront, forged steadily 

 ahead in the business, so that by 1774 the American ocean-going 

 whaling fleet numbered three hundred and sixty bottoms, three hun- 

 dred of them out of Massachusetts. And their owners were very 

 prosperous, for all oil commanded a high price, and sperm oil as 

 much as ^^40 per ton, while baleen was at a premium. Meanwhile, 



