'long shore 



IN 1680, a certain John Hawes was appointed as one of four 

 men who for four or five pounds a whale, according to cir- 

 cumstances, were *'to look out for and secure the town all such 

 whales as by God's providence shall be cast up in their several 

 bounds." The town was Yarmouth on Cape Cod, and the 

 method of "whaling'' — let us call it that — which was practised 

 then, was the one most used by the New England colonists of 

 that period. 



The dead whales that drifted on to the beaches of Cape Cod 

 and Nantucket were indeed providental bounties. Whaling and 

 the uses of whale oil were an old story and the enterprising 

 colonists seized eagerly upon blubber and bone. Questions of 

 ownership were settled for the most part by law. In the early 

 days of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies the 

 Government claimed a part of each drift whale, the town claimed 

 a part, and the finder, claiming the rest, got it if no one success- 

 fully disputed his title. In the beginning the man who found a 

 whale was liable to meet with difficulties of one kind or another. 

 But in Plymouth Colony an order of the court, of June 6, 1654, 

 declared that whales cast up on the lands that proprietors had 

 bought belonged to the proprietors, which did away with con- 

 siderable ill feeling; and in 1661 the colonial treasurer, Con- 

 stant Southworth, offered Sandwich, Barnstable, Yarmouth, 

 and Eastham whatever drift whales appeared on their shores, 

 if they would pay the Government one hogshead of oil, delivered 

 in Boston, for each whale thus obtained. 



In the colonial records are to be found a tangle of other inter- 

 woven and overlapping statutes concerning drift whales and the 

 questions of ownership that arose from them, as well as records 



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