SAILOR FISHERMEN OF NEW ENGLAND. 81 



the men of Marblehead, and Marblehead alone, stand forward to lead the army along the perilous 

 path to unfading glories and honors in the achievements of Trenton. There, sir, went the fisher- 

 men of Marblehead, alike at Lome upon land or water, alike ardent, patriotic, and unflinching 

 wheuever they unfurled the flag of the country.'" 



Starbuck, in his history of the American whale fishery, gives the following glowing tribute ti- 

 the public service of the whalemen of this country: 



"Few interests have exerted a more marked influence upon the history of the United States 

 than that of the fisheries. Aside from the value they have had in a commercial point of view, thej 

 have always been found to be the nurseries of a hardy, daring, and indefatigable race <>i' seamen, 

 such as scarcely any other pursuit could have trained. The pioneers of the sea, whalemen, were 

 the advance guard, the forlorn hope of civilization. Exploring expeditions followed alter to glean 

 where they had reaped. In the frozen seas of the north and the south their keels plowed to the 

 extreme limit of navigation, and between the tropics they pursued their prey through regions never 

 before traversed by the vessels of a civilized community. Holding their lives in their hands, as it 

 were, whether they harpooned the leviathan in the deep or put into some hitherto unknown port for 

 supplies, no extreme of heat or cold could daunt them, no thought of danger hold them in check. 

 Their lives have ever been one continual round of hair-breadth escapes, in which the risk was alike 

 shared by officers and men. No shirk could find an opportunity to indulge in shirking, no coward 

 a chance to display his cowardice, and in their hazardous life incompetents were speedily weeded 

 out. Many a tale of danger and toil and suffering, startling, severe, and horrible, has illumined 

 the pages of the history of this pursuit, and scarce any, even the humblest of these hardy mariners, 

 but can, from his own experience, narrate truths stranger than fiction. In many ports, among 

 hundreds of islands, on many seas the flag of the country from which they sailed was first displayed 

 from the mast-head of a whale-ship. Pursuing their avocation wherever a chance presented, the 

 American flag was first unfurled in an English port from the deck of one American whaleman, and 

 the ports of the western coast of South America first beheld the Stars and Stripes shown as the 

 standard of another. It may be safely alleged that but for them the western oceans would much 

 longer have been comparatively unknown, and with equal truth may it be said that whatever of 

 honor or glory the United States may have won in its explorations of these oceans, the necessity 

 for their explorations was a tribute wrung from the Government, though not without earnest and 

 continued effort, to the interests of our mariners, who, for years before, had pursued the whale in 

 these uncharted seas, and threaded their way wilh extremest care among these uudescribed 

 islands, reefs, and shoals. Into the field opened by them flowed the trade of the civilized world. 

 In their footsteps followed Christianity. They introduced the missionary to new spheres of useful- 

 ness, and made his presence tenable. Says a writer in the London Quarterly Review: 'The whale 

 fishery first opened to Great Britain a beneficial intercourse with the coast of Spanish America ; it 

 led in the sequel to the independence of the Spanish colonies.' * * * 'But for our whalers, we 

 never might have founded our colonies in Van Diemau's Land and Australia — or if we had we could 

 not have maintained them in their early stages of danger and privation. Moreover, our intimacy 

 with the Polynesians must be traced to the same source. The whalers were the first that traded 

 in that quarter — they prepared the field for the missionaries; and the same thing is now in pro- 

 gress in New Ireland, New Britain, and New Zealand.' All that the English fishery has done for 

 Great Britain, the American fishery has done for the United States — and more. In war our Navy 

 has drawn upon it for some of its sturdiest and bravest seamen, and in peace our commercial marine 

 has found in it its choicest and most skillful officers. In connection with the cod-fishery it schooled 

 the sons of America to a knowledge of their own strength, and iu its protection developed aud 

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