Ill 



THE REVOLUTION 



WHEN the American Revolution broke out, Nantucket 

 was the great whaling centre of the American colonies; 

 New Bedford in a comparatively few years had given promise 

 of its future preeminence; and the whalemen of Long Island 

 were working away undisturbed by any thought of disputes be- 

 tween later historians as to whether the men of Long Island or 

 those of Cape Cod were the first American whalers. 



In Europe, Dutch whaling had gained rapidly from the year 

 when the Noordsche Company lost its monopoly (1642), and, 

 being thereafter free to all, it had made still greater gains, af- 

 fected, of course, by the subsequent fall and rise of prices. Thus 

 it had climbed to the first place among whaling nations. The 

 Germans held a strong, although much less important, position. 

 The French were still whaling in a small way. And England 

 had made a sound, if as yet small, beginning of a new fleet. In 

 spite of the bounties by which England sought to build her whal- 

 ing, in spite of every hindrance given the colonial fleets, it was 

 from the American colonies that the strongest rivals of the 

 Dutch were sailing when a certain quaint skirmish was fought 

 at Lexington, Massachusetts. 



Already the seas where colonial vessels cruised for whales 

 were threatened with a variety of perils, for such dangers as 

 some people to-day associate, perhaps, with a more remote 

 past persisted, in reality, until the founding of the republic was 

 an old story. Occasional whalemen crossed boarding knives 

 with the cutlasses of pirates; and of pirates there is something 

 that should be said in this connection. The general glamour of 

 romance that has somehow been thrown over piratical days 

 blinds a good many fairly intelligent persons to the true char- 



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