WHALERS OF LONG AGO 



IN THE moneth of Aprill, 1614," that stout-hearted old sea- 

 farer, Captain John Smith, wrote in his ''Description of 

 New England," "with two ships from London, of a few Mar- 

 chants, I chanced to arrive in New England, a parte of Ameryca: 

 at the Isle of Monahigan in 43i of northerly latitude: our plot 

 was there to take Whales and make tryalls of a Myne of Gold 

 and Copper. If those failed. Fish and Furres was there our 

 refuge, to make ourselves savers howsoever. We found this 

 Whale-fishing a costly conclusion: we saw many, and spent 

 much time chasing them; but could not kill any: they beeing a 

 kinde of lubartes, and not the Whale that yeeldes Finnes and 

 Oyle as wee expected. For oure Golde, it was rather the 

 Masters device to get a voyage that proiected it, then any 

 knowledge hee had at all of any such matter. Fish and Furres 

 was now our guard; and by our late arrival and long lingring 

 about the Whales, the prime of both those seasons were past 

 ere wee perceived it: we thinking that their seasons served at 

 all times." 



Captain John Smith might have been one of the fathers of 

 American whaling, if the elusiveness of our northern whales had 

 not so sorely discouraged him; but he was not the first man to 

 hunt whales in American waters. By the time he crossed the 

 Atlantic to go whaling off our coast, expeditions sent out by 

 Basque and Breton ship-owners, and merchants of Amsterdam 

 and Bayonne and Bristol and London, had found the way to 

 the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Law- 

 rence, where fish and whales abounded. Some writers con- 

 tend that as early as the 14th Century the Basques, who in- 

 habited the shores of the Bay of Biscay where the frontiers of 



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