88 WHALING 



families began to rebuild their fleets; and they pm^sued the in- 

 dustry with such vigour that in their eager search for larger 

 and more easily obtained cargoes they pushed out into new 

 whaling grounds and thus laid the foundation of the great 

 period of exploration in the middle of the next century. 



Nantucket, Boston, Hingham, Welfleet, Braintree, Newbury- 

 port, Plymouth, Bristol, Providence, New London, Sag Har- 

 bour, and Hudson, all reentered the industry, and the whahng 

 houses undertook to restore whale products to the place of 

 economic importance from which the various substitutes 

 evolved during the eight years of war had thrust them. But 

 the period of hope was short-lived, and the whalemen soon 

 found need of the determined spirit with which William Rotch 

 of Nantucket, in spite of losing more than sixty thousand dollars, 

 had maintained his fleet during the war. 



The arrival at London of the oil-laden American vessels, 

 Bedford and Industry, had seriously disturbed the English 

 Government, which was paying heavy bounties in order to 

 build up the British whaling industry. In 1784, Leith, Dunbar, 

 and Dundee were about at the ebb tide of the Scottish whaling 

 that had reached its high-water mark in 1755 and 1766; but 

 whaling out of Liverpool was growing; and the Hull whaling fleet, 

 which had suffered heavily during the war with America when 

 the Government took most of its vessels for transport service, 

 was making a new start. (It is interesting to note that the most 

 famous of Hull whalers, which sailed on her first whaling voyage 

 in 1874, was the Truelove, a vessel built in Philadelphia in 1864 

 and captured by the British.) Not to mention in detail other 

 ports that swelled the total of the British whaling fleets, nine 

 vessels in the southern whale fishery were registered from Lon- 

 don, Poole, and Bristol in 1783. To secure the industry, but 

 recently placed on a firm base after long competition with a 

 newly revived and vigorous rival, the British Government 

 placed a duty of £18 a tun on foreign oil. 



That, so far as American whalemen were concerned, closed the 

 British market for sperm oil. The price of oil, which had been 

 £30 before the war, fell to £17; this meant an actual money loss. 



