92 WHALING 



to New Bedford. In New Bedford he lived the rest of his hfe 

 and died in 1828. 



Some whalemen, meanwhile, had sold their vessels and aban- 

 doned the business, and whaling prospects in the America of the 

 seventies and eighties were gloomy; but in 1789 France offered 

 a market for whale products from America, and business picked 

 up. The *'boom" lasted only three years or so, and in itself 

 it was of small importance; but in certain ways it had a peculi- 

 arly far-reaching influence on the American whaling industry as 

 a whole. 



Finding that whales were once more scarce in New England 

 waters, the whaling towns sent out larger vessels on longer 

 voyages. Following the example of English whalemen, who 

 had gone a few years before to the whaling grounds of the 

 Pacific, which various earlier sailors and travellers had dis- 

 covered and recorded, they sent their vessels round the Horn. 

 It was in 1791 that a fleet of six sails, the first American vessels 

 to hunt whales in the Pacific, put out from Nantucket and New 

 Bedford on a pioneer voyage and began the expansion of the 

 industry that was eventually to reach the Arctic seas beyond 

 Bering Strait, the Indian Ocean, and South Georgia. 



And from all this, the end of whaling out of Nantucket fol- 

 lowed logically and surely! 



That island home of American whaling, where for a time the 

 industry had grown fastest and prospered most, has a harbour in 

 some respects excellent, but blocked by a bar at its mouth 

 against vessels that drew more than ten feet. Small vessels, 

 such as those earlier whalemen had sailed, crossed the bar with 

 little hindrance; but as the whalers went on longer voyages 

 and used larger vessels to meet the new conditions, they found 

 the bar increasingly difficult to cross, and though the Islanders 

 resorted to lighters, with which they landed part of their car- 

 goes, they were only postponing the day when Nantucket must 

 fall behind in the race for supremacy among whaling towns and 

 must finally abandon the race altogether. Nantucket had 

 shown many another town the way, and she fought hard to 

 hold her place, but the Government would not help the com- 



