Decline of American Whaling. 71 
On January 1, 1906, there were three whaling ports 
employing fleets as follows: New Bedford twenty-four 
vessels, tonnage 5,618; San Francisco fourteen vessels, 
tonnage 3,626; Provincetown three vessels, tonnage 340. 
Norwich, Conn., again appeared as a whaling port with 
one brig of 294 tons, after a lapse of seventy years. For 
the ten years ending 1905 the whaling fleet has aver- 
aged fifty-one sail with a tonnage of 10,184 tons, yield- 
ing an average annual product valued at nearly $1,000,- 
ooo. When compared with the annual averages for a 
half century ago it seems hard to realize that the figures 
apply to the same industry. 
Accompanying the decline in the size of the fleet and 
the amount and value of the annual product of the whale 
fishery, there has been a similar decline in the market 
price of oil. The price of bone, however, has steadily 
risen, a fact of the utmost significance to the industry. 
After 1847 the price of sperm oil never fell below $1.00 
per gallon for thirty consecutive years—a good part of 
the time it ranged between $1.30 and $1.60 per gallon, 
while after the war it rose as high as $2.55 per gallon.§ 
During the same period the price of whale oil fluctuated 
generally between 50 and 80 cents per gallon, going as 
high as $1.45 per gallon at the close of the war. Since 
about 1875, though the prices of sperm and whale oils 
have varied up and down from year to year, the tendency 
on the whole has been a steady decline. In 1895 whale 
oil went the lowest that it has been since 1834, falling to 
28 cents per gallon, and in the year following, sperm 
oil fell to the lowest price recorded in a hundred years, 
40 cents per gallon. At present (1905) the average 
prices are: sperm oil 46 cents per gallon, and whale 
oil 31 cents per gallon. 
On the other hand the price of bone has tended steadily 
upward, though showing wide fluctuations from year to 
* See complete table of average annual prices, Table V of Appendix I. 
