316 WHALING 



too, for whalers. Everywhere were boxes and bags and bales, 

 and everywhere were mattresses and pillows with preposterous 

 stripes of pink and blue, billed for Cape Verde Island ports. 



But the days of the boys who came from farms and inland 

 towns to try their luck at sea were gone for ever. The men 

 working on the wharves were Bravas. No other people could 

 have given their low ''Heave — a! Heave — a! Heave — a!" 

 that sleepy quality so curiously at variance with their stout 

 hauling, as it melted into the hollow roll of blocks, the creaking 

 and scraping and flapping of a loose fore-and-aft sail, the shout- 

 ing of teamsters, the rumble of casks rolled across the deck. 



Although there was a wilderness of spindles in the city be- 

 hind me, whale oil had made that city what it was, and the sons 

 and daughters of great whalemen still live on those long, shaded 

 streets. I sat on a mammoth iron kettle whose side was flat- 

 tened to fit snugly against the try- works; I rested my feet on a 

 new try-pot crated in clean white wood ; I twisted around to see 

 past a battered whaleboat. 



The great whaling industry, as old New England knew it, has 

 indeed come nearly to an end. The dealers in bone and oil, and 

 guns and bombs and craft, the riggers, coopers, carpenters, and 

 smiths, have dwindled in numbers until a few men left from those 

 who throve in the days when ships and barques crowded the 

 water-front, are turning to other trades or are using the small 

 business that whaling continues to bring them, to eke out slen- 

 derly the living they get from whatever odd jobs come their way. 



Of a once mighty shipping there remained then only two or 

 three such round, comfortable vessels as the Wanderer — vessels 

 with white yards and black sides and squat deck-houses and 

 thick, clumsy stanchions — such vessels as the one-legged Ahab 

 skippered. There is now but one little schooner, the Margarett, 

 Edwards master, upholding the tottering traditions of old- 

 fashioned whaling. The barque Wanderer herself, last of the 

 big whalers, is outfitting now in New Bedford for an Atlantic 

 whaling cruise. But it is the last gasp.^ 



What has brought it about: this decline and all but death of 



^ Late in August, 1924, the l^awderer sailed: twenty-four hours later, in a 75- 

 mile-an-hour gale, she was wrecked and abandoned on the rocks off Cutty hunk. 



