THE CIVIL WAR 225 



abouts, and whenabouts, were common knowledge; his vessel, 

 built for capacity rather than for speed, was almost always 

 slow and seldom, if ever, armed. Even supposing him to have 

 finished his voyage and laid his course for home with a full 

 ship, he must sail perhaps many thousand miles along the well- 

 known lanes of commerce through seas in which an enemy 

 could easily waylay him. San Francisco had sent out a whaler 

 or two in 1850, and shore whaling on the coast of California 

 had begun in 1851, but not until fifteen or twenty years later 

 did whaling out of Pacific ports gain much headway. The 

 great majority of whaling vessels in the Pacific, up to the end 

 of the Civil War, hailed from New England and had to return 

 by way of Good Hope or the Horn. 



Thus, the Civil War broke upon an industry with a great 

 part of its fleets at sea. One thing that must impress the per- 

 son who spends considerable time in reading the old whaling 

 documents and narratives, and in absorbing all available whaling 

 lore, is the comparative truth of the charge that was made 

 year after year against the whalemen of Cape Cod and Nan- 

 tucket and New Bedford: virtually, they cared for nothing, 

 thought of nothing, knew nothing, except whaling. To save a 

 whale, take care of the blubber, and dispose of the oil, was for 

 them the highest art and the chief end of life — which is why they 

 beat the world at their chosen trade. At a time when Abraham 

 Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas were fighting to represent 

 Illinois in the United States Senate, when John Brown and his 

 nineteen men were seizing the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, 

 when the North was electing Abraham Lincoln President, and 

 when the South was firing on Sumter, there were hundreds of 

 master whalemen and thousands of ordinary whalemen at sea, 

 intent upon their blubber-hunting and so isolated by their 

 employment that they could not, if they would, follow the 

 national drama that was being enacted on shore. 



At the outbreak of the war numerous officers of Southern 

 birth and sympathy, having resigned their commissions in the 

 Federal Navy, ''the old navy," they afterward called it, at 

 once received commissions of corresponding rank in the new 



