THE GOLD RUSH 191 



quite forgotten, are all that is left of the erstwhile glories of 

 many a village that had fleets at sea a hundred years ago. But 

 the men of old New Bedford were farsighted, and perceiving 

 that there was need for other activities to absorb the capital 

 that their greatest industry had won from the sea, they assumed 

 other business interests at a moment as well chosen as if they 

 had foreseen (which they doubtless had not) the decline of 

 whaling. 



Had they waited even until 1849, there would have seemed to 

 be plainer reasons for their new ventures — they would have 

 shown more discernment and less divination — for in 1849 the 

 rush to the California gold-fields struck an effective, if temporary, 

 blow at the whaling fleets. But in 1846 the American whaling 

 fleet reached its highest point: it comprised 736 vessels, which 

 measured, in the aggregate, more than 230,000 tons. The newly 

 perceived opportunity to make profitable voyages for bowheads 

 along the coast of Kamchatka, in the Okhotsk Sea, and in Bering 

 Strait had created so eager a demand for vessels that between 

 1844 and 1846 ninety-one were added to the fleet. 



Of the first in the series of blows that was to demolish the 

 great industry which had reached here the highest point in all 

 its history, there was no warning. Colonel Sutter of Coloma, 

 California, innocently began it all by building a mill race; 

 and James W. Marshall, who actually discovered gold on Janu- 

 ary 24, 1848, certainly had no notion whatsoever that he was 

 seriously to inconvenience the whaling merchants by the Acush- 

 net River on the other side of the continent. But in December 

 of that same year news came to New Bedford that the crews of 

 sixteen whalers had deserted and left their vessels lying in Cali- 

 fornia ports; and, if that was not enough to disturb the owners, 

 the Whaleman's Shipping List and Merchant's Transcript of 

 New Bedford published, in the issue of August 21, 1849, a letter 

 written by Hiram Webb, dated at San Francisco, July 2, 1849, 

 and sent from California in the steamship Empire City, which 

 gave them cause to regard the matter with even graver concern. 

 For the most part the letter discusses the kinds of goods that 

 could, and those that could not, be sold at profit in the Far 



