THE GOLD RUSH 195 



vessels sold out of the whaling industry and outfitted to take 

 passengers and merchandise to California is long. Issue after 

 issue of the Whaleman's Shipping List reports defection from 

 the fleet. The world of the footfree was the Far West, and 

 dreams of a golden future stimulated eager adventurers to pay, 

 for their passage, sums that took whole squadrons of whalers 

 from blubber-hunting and sent them round the Horn with 

 cabins and steerages crammed. The vessels came from the 

 fleets of New Bedford, New London, Sag Harbour, Stonington, 

 Fairhaven, and many another port. There were the Flora, 

 the Poivhattan, the Citizen, the Pantheon, the St. Lawrence, the 

 Otranto, the John Jay, the Golconda, the George and Martha — 

 the list is long and replete with that variety of suggestion which 

 is peculiar to the names of ships. Word came home to New 

 Bedford that the ship Inez had put into port at Sydney to sell 

 her cargo and proceed to California. The crew of the ship 

 Henry Clay set her on fire off the Galapagos Islands, as did the 

 crews of many other vessels, eager, no matter how great the cost, 

 to escape from the whaling grounds to the golden shores. In 

 Nantucket and New Bedford stories were rife, some of them 

 fiction, some of them fact, of ships scuttled and sunk by muti- 

 nous crews. Finally, and most demoralizing of all, men in large 

 numbers shipped on board New England whalers, as Jack 

 Whidden had done, for the sole purpose of getting free transpor- 

 tation to the gold mines at a time when there was tremendous 

 and bitter competition for legitimate passage, and with every 

 intention of deserting at the first opportunity after reaching the 

 Pacific coast. 



In the smaller whaling ports the disorganizing months when 

 the rush to California was at its height marked virtually the end 

 of whaling. In some of them, indeed, particularly in the Maine 

 whaling ports, the industry had already lost ground. But New 

 Bedford, in her greatest days the greatest whaling port of all 

 time, having, by 1830, forged ahead of Nantucket and having 

 built, by 1840, a whaling business twice as large as Nantucket's, 

 managed to weather the disturbing days of '49 with only a 

 few tremors. When the gold rush waned and ceased, she con- 



