CHAPTER III. 
THE RisE oF AMERICAN WHALING FROM THE SETTLING 
oF MASSACHUSETTS TO THE WAR OF 1812. 
By 1620 the English and Dutch Spitzbergen whale 
fishery had assumed such importance that the methods 
and advantages of the industry must have been well 
known to the early New England colonists before they 
came to America. Thatcher! says that the early settlers 
were at first undecided whether to adopt Cape Cod for 
their new home or to look for some more attractive site, 
and that one of the main arguments in favor of the 
Cape Cod locality was the prospect of profitable fishing 
it afforded; “for large whales of the best kind for oil 
and bone came daily alongside and played about the 
ship. The master and his mate, and others experienced 
tn fishing, preferred 1t to the Greenland whale fishery,?,and 
asserted that were they provided with the proper imple- 
ments £300 or £400 worth of oil might be secured.”’ 
That whales were abundant at this time both in deep 
water and along the coast seems undoubted. According 
to Starbuck,* Captain John Smith, in 1614, found whales 
so plentiful along the coast that he turned aside from 
the original object of his voyage to pursue them. And 
Sabine quotes from the journal of Richard Mather, who 
came to Massachusetts Bay colony in 1635, where the 
latter tells of seeing, off the New England coast, “mighty 
whales spewing up water in the air like the smoke of a 
chimney . . . of such incredible bigness that I will 
1 Thatcher: History of Plymouth, p. 21. 
2 The italics are mine. 
* Starbuck: History of American Whale Fishery. Footnote, p. 5. 
