XXn FOREWORD. 



It is not easy to daunt a whaleman. The gambling ele- 

 ment in the business is too strong. He risks his life, he 

 risks being eaten by cannibals, or being frozen into Arctic 

 ice, he risks financial disaster, but all the time he "runs 

 a chance" of making a prodigious amount of money in 

 a few months. There lies the fascination. 



Consider the terrible disaster to the Arctic fleet in the 

 autumn of 1871. Trusting to their experience of the 

 locking-in of the ice for the winter, and disregarding the 

 friendly warnings of the Esquimo, who urged them to run 

 for their lives, the whole fleet, some thirty-four vessels, 

 were imprisoned in the ice-sheet. Three were crushed be- 

 fore the whalemen were convinced that they must be aban- 

 doned with their costly cargoes, and the entire company, 

 twelve hundred seamen, with some women and children, 

 must make their way across the bitter, icy seas to the seven 

 vessels lying on the southern edge of the icefields. The 

 loss in New Bedford alone was over a million dollars. 

 Yet, the next year found twenty-seven whalers risking 

 the precarious northern seas. 



No, it was neither battle, murder, nor sudden death 

 which took the heart out of the whaling. The causes of 

 its decline were economic. Whalemen had never been 

 financiers. No organization among them had controlled 

 the supply, and glutted markets were forever bringing 

 down prices. Conservation had not begun to be talked of 

 in those days. Whalemen pursued their prey relentlessly 

 farther and farther from shore and even up under the 

 ice of the North Pacific. Then, just when scarcity of 

 whales made longer and longer voyages necessary — some- 

 times voyages lasting four, five and six years — and the 

 price of whale oil correspondingly increased, came the 

 discovery of coal oil. Once the people got over their fear 



