Late Noon in the West 253 



cities continued to shine. Then "Progress" stepped in and adminis- 

 tered a series of sledge-hammer blows to the whole preposterous 

 business. 



The forewarning came in the slump of 1857, the real blow in the 

 discovery of petroleum in 1 859, and the coup de grace in the form of 

 the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. The effects of the discovery 

 of petroleum emerged only slowly as adverse factors in the whale-oil 

 industry because this development was cloaked by the hysteria of 

 the Civil War. It is, however, this phase of the period and its after- 

 math that provide us with the really interesting and significant as- 

 pects of American whaling history. 



Greatest damage was done to the Yankee whaling fleet initially by 

 Southern privateers, but there was a lot more aiding and abetting 

 in this wholesale destruction by nonbelligerents than is generally 

 realized or than the history books state. There are numerous allu- 

 sions in the contemporary records of other countries that clearly 

 indicate what can, at best, be described as sharp practices by many 

 governments, both colonial and others. The Hollanders impounded — 

 which is merely a polite term for seized — a number of whalers in 

 the Orient, and the British developed a regular trade in what they 

 termed "abandoned" vessels which somehow invariably turned up as 

 supply ships for the Confederates. The over-all result was that the 

 whaling fleet was reduced by almost two thirds. 



When the war ended, there was an all-out business boom and the 

 price of whale oil and baleen shot up to ridiculous and, as was soon 

 proved, quite unstable values. By this time, the east and west coasts 

 of America were linked overland and the latter had started on its 

 mushroom growth both in wealth and importance. Although there 

 were still sperm whales in the Atlantics and in the Indian Ocean, 

 there were many more left in the Pacific, and almost the whole re- 

 maining whale fleet was concentrated in that ocean. The passage from 

 the Pacific to New England and back had always been tedious; now 

 it became somewhat absurd, and the whalers began unloading what- 

 ever quota of oil might be needed for local consumption on the West 

 Coast. Then they took to unloading their entire cargoes there, leav- 

 ing also what was needed for the East Coast to be freighted thence 

 in the barrel in primitive "tankers." Finally, the transcontinental rail- 

 way reached a point of efficiency that permitted such bulk products 



