Late Noon in the West 247 



apace, a new kind of wealth had begun to accumulate, and the Con- 

 gress was looking to overseas trade as well as to home agriculture to 

 round out the economy. Living, as we do today, almost a century 

 into the age of petroleum, we often fail to realize the enormous 

 importance of animal and vegetable oils prior to the discovery of 

 this mineral substance. Enormous quantities of oil were needed for 

 lighting, for heating, and even for cooking, while lubricants were 

 in ever-increasing demand. Also, animal oils were essential to wool 

 and other textile manufacture and to many other growing industries. 

 While cotton. Unseed, and some other vegetable oils were available 

 in fair abundance, animal fats and oils were preferable for many 

 purposes and whale oil constituted by far the most valuable and 

 important of these. There was thus a great incentive to get the 

 whaling industry going again for, unlike the years following the 

 Revolution, there was now a large and growing demand for its prod- 

 ucts in America itself. 



The New Englanders set to work immediately after the end of hos- 

 tilities. By 1 8 1 8 there were fewer than forty whalers left, but by the 

 following year sixty-three had been commissioned, and by 182 1 there 

 were eighty-four. Although the Nantucketers made a valiant effort 

 again to lead the country in the field, the troubles with their sand 

 bar thwarted their every move and New Bedford took first position, 

 both in the size of her fleet and in the volume of whale products she 

 imported. Offshore whaling was dead, the black rights had become 

 almost extinct, and the Greenland rights had already retreated so 

 far into the Arctic Ice that it was no longer worthwhile dispatching 

 more than a few ships in their pursuit, and in competition, to boot, 

 with the still fairly active Hollanders and the Britishers, who had 

 had a free rein in those seas throughout the war. Thus it was to the 

 much more valuable sperming that the Yankees turned, and for this, 

 larger ships were needed that could remain at sea for years and cir- 

 cumnavigate the world. To be economical they had to be just too 

 big to overcome Nantucket's wretched sand bar. 



Not only was the build-up of the whaling fleet in America very 

 rapid; the extension of its operations throughout the world pro- 

 ceeded at a quite extraordinary pace. The first American whalers 

 had rounded the Horn and entered the Pacific in 1791, and those 

 ships which managed to avoid the war continued to follow that 



