70 WHALING 



of cases general and specific; for such salt-water manna, it was 

 evident at a very early period of the New England settlements, 

 was coveted nearly as earnestly as godliness, and to the long, 

 sandy shores of Cape Cod and Nantucket, which were swept by 

 currents of the open ocean, dead whales not infrequently floated 

 on the tide. But most of the old statutes are similar to those 

 noted above, and except for their remarkable spelling, which 

 soon becomes tiresome they make dull reading. Having little 

 to do with active whaling, they need not concern us save as 

 they indicate the lively interest that the very earliest settlers 

 took in the economic possibilities of whales, an interest which 

 soon led those thrifty and enterprising, if socially impossible, 

 souls to take to the sea in pursuit of whales when those delivered 

 "by God's providence" upon their shores proved insufficient 

 to meet their needs. 



For their first whaling the colonists found invaluable allies 

 in the Indians native to the coast, who were hardy and ad- 

 venturous and could be hired for a very moderate wage. As 

 regards their experience in whaling there is room for argument, 

 in spite of Joseph de Acosta's diverting and imaginative account 

 of their methods, and Dr. Glover M. Allen in his monograph on 

 the Whalebone Whales of New England gives it as his con- 

 clusion that probably they seldom actually attacked whales. 



Of those times when they did attack whales, various reports of 

 whaling at the very beginning of the 17th Century give the 

 methods that they practised, and they all go to indicate that 

 primitive whalemicn have worked in much the same way the world 

 over and in all times. With a great fleet of canoes *nd led by 

 their "king," as the old writers call him, they put out, armed 

 with bone harpoons and lines made of the bark of trees. They 

 struck the whale and paid out the line, which very likely was 

 made fast to floats or logs that s^^ed in place of the drugs that 

 later whalemen hove over; then, when the great beast rose again, 

 they drove flights of arrows into its black back. When at last 

 the whale rolled fin out, they towed it ashore and divided it 

 among all the people, who used the meat for food. 



The first settlers of New England, then, came from a land 



