320 WHALING 



does not seem to be any demand for the large stock on hand, the 

 principal reason, probably, being the foreign war." 



Thus dies old-fashioned whaling. There is only one way now 

 to see it, and that is in its records and relics. Of records there 

 are many, beginning away back with the days of Basque and 

 Norseman and coming on down, through the Spitzbergen days — 

 both English and Dutch accounts of them — the later Arctic whal- 

 ing of the Hull and the Dundee fleet, and the ''southern whale 

 fishery" to our own American whaling. Of those earlier days 

 some few first-hand accounts still survive, and of American 

 whaling there are literally hundreds of log books and account 

 books — the one showing life at sea; the other, the counting- 

 house side of the game. 



Some few of these records — copies of the old books on early 

 and later whaling, and a few scattered logs and journals and ac- 

 count books — are to be found in a few large libraries and some- 

 times in the most unexpected places. In the New Bedford Free 

 Public Library, however, is such a collection as one could hardly 

 believe possible. Possible or not, there it is and for any one to 

 see and read in: five hundred or more logs and as many account 

 books just as they came from captains and owners and the grown 

 children of captains and owners, who have given them freely 

 to swell the library's big collection of whaling literature. 



A complete file of the New Bedford Shipping List and 

 Merchant's Transcript is there, too, with lists of vessels; notices 

 of arrivals and departures; oil market and bone market reports; 

 news of mutinies, wrecks, record cargoes, and newly discovered 

 whaling grounds; advertisements of riggers and outfitters — 

 everything "of interest to whalemen." 



Downstairs in the newspaper room are pictures of whaling, be- 

 ginning — chronologically speaking — with three highly informing 

 old woodcuts of the Jonah incident. There are copies of the 

 very early copperplates of Spitzbergen whaling, and Japanese 

 prints of whaling off their own coast. There are German prints, 

 French prints, and English prints, lithographs and photographs 

 and water colours from the stiffest and most absurdly unreal 

 whales in — or rather, on — the petrified waves of an ocean that 



