IN THE DOLDRUMS 95 



to the whaling grounds when the state of the seas permit- 

 ted. 



The embargo of 1807 for a time made an end of exporting 

 whale products, thus also keeping the prices at home too low 

 to permit a fair profit; and the danger from English privateers 

 made it virtually impossible to get any insurance at all. Then, 

 although American whaling had been gaining somewhat be- 

 tween 1800 and 1807, the Berlin and Milan decrees, and the 

 retaliatory orders which closed European ports to our commerce, 

 hit it still another blow. 



Adventure and romance there must have been. Rough and 

 dirty though the trade was, they were unquestionably a part of 

 it, as they are part and parcel of every trade — when viewed from 

 enough distance to give the right perspective — in w^hich men 

 match their powers against superior physical force in a war to 

 the death. And though the history of the fighting whales, the 

 stove boats, and the mutinous crews of the period is unwritten, 

 even the mere business side of it all is pregnant with stories of 

 brave tilting against adverse fortune. 



But America then, as at virtually all other times in her 

 whaling history, had no monopoly of the industry, and in the 

 years when the American whaling fleet was rolling in the dol- 

 drums of war and peace and glutted markets, gay young men 

 were adventuring in the whaling vessels of northern Europe, 

 and at least one lad, who wrote a book that ran through many 

 editions, was observing the methods of whaling practised by the 

 Indians of the Northwest Coast of America, where the Nootka 

 Indians had taken his ship and massacred every member of the 

 crew but himself and one other. As a prisoner among the 

 Indians for nearly three years, he observed their methods of 

 whaling and eventually incorporated them in the book that 

 he wrote to tell the story of his adventures.^ 



As one of the principal sources of their food, and as the source 

 of the bones of which they made war clubs and the sinews that 

 they used for fishing lines, whaling held in the eyes of the Nootka 



"A Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt." 



