IX 



fisherman's luck 



IT IS impossible to read the older narratives of whaling that 

 have come down to us, without surprise and, let us hope, a 

 becoming humility as we see what a relatively small part our 

 American whaling industry has played in the history of whaling 

 as a whole. After all, we profited vastly by knowledge that 

 was a commonplace to generations long ago. Of course, Arctic 

 whaling in Greenland waters was an old story long before the 

 Mayflower brought the first settlers to Plymouth, and there 

 had been whaling on this side of the Atlantic many years be- 

 fore the first Nantucket boats took to sea. American whaling, 

 which grew from the cautious expeditions of the shore whalers 

 to the great and adventurous industry with which we are all 

 familiar, was based on the knowledge and experience gained 

 during hundreds of years by the sailors of France, Spain, Hol- 

 land, and England. 



We like to regard the earlier of our captains who went whaling 

 round the Horn as discoverers of the '^on-shore" and "off- 

 shore" grounds; but Alonso de Ovalle, in "An Historical 

 Relation of the Kingdom of Chile,'' pubHshed in 1649, dis- 

 courses at length on the abundance and size of whales in Chilian 

 waters. We think of Captain Joseph Allen of Nantucket as 

 making a discovery of importance when he went whaling on the 

 coast of Japan in 1820; but any whaleman might have taken the 

 same tip nearly two hundred years before from Jean- Albert de 

 Mandelslo, who wrote of the Japanese as whaling off their own 

 coast, and, further, commented on the number of whales 

 that he saw in the Indian Ocean in 1839, when he was on his 

 way from Ceylon to Good Hope. Such observations are typical 

 and they appeared in various languages. The abundance of 



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