HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN WHALE FISHERY. 6 



oceans would much longer have been comparatively unknown,* and 

 with equal truth may it be said that whatever of honor or glory the 

 United States may have won in its explorations of these oceans, the 

 necessity for their explorations was a tribute wrung from the Govern- 

 ment, though not without earnest and continued efifort, to the interests 

 of our mariners, who, for years before, had pursued the whale in these 

 uncharted seas, and threaded their way with extremest care among 

 these undescribed islands, reefs, and shoals. Into the field opened by 

 them flowed the trade of the civilized world. In their footsteps followed 

 Christianity. They introduced the missionary to new spheres of useful- 

 ness, and made his presence tenable. Says a writer in the London 

 Quarterly Review : "The whale fishery first opened to Great Britain p, 

 beneficial intercourse with the coast of Spanish America; it led in 



THE SEQUEL TO THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE SPANISH COLONIES." 



♦ * * * * ^^Bnt for our Whalers, we never might hare founded our 

 colonies in Van J)ieman''s Land and Australia — or if we had ice could not 

 have maintained them in their early stages of danger and privation. — More- 

 over, our intimacy with the Polynesians must be traced to the same 

 source. The Whalers were the first that traded in that quarter— they 

 PREPARED THE FIELD FOR THE MISSIONARIES: and the same thingisnow 

 in progress in New Ireland, New Britain, and New Zealand." All that the 

 English fishery has done for Great Britain, the American fishery has 

 done for the United States— and more. In war our Navy has drawn upon 

 it for some of its sturdiest and bravest seamen, and in peace our com- 

 mercial marine has found in it its choicest and most skilful officers. In 

 connection with the cod-fishery it schooled the sous of America to a 

 knowledge of their own strength, and in its protection developed and 

 intensified that spirit of self-reliance, independence, and national power 

 to which the conflict of from 1775 to 1783 was a natural and necessary 

 resultant. The wars carried on between England and France from 1600 



*The North American Review, in 1834, in an article on the Whale Fishery, says, "A 

 few years since, two Russian discovery ships came in sight of a group of cold, inhospi- 

 table islands in the Antarctic Ocean. The commander imagined himself a discoverer, 

 and doubtless was prepared with drawn sword and with the flag of his sovereign flying 

 over his head to take possession in the name of the Czar. At this time he was 

 becalmed in a dense fog. Judge of his surprise, when the fog cleared away, to see a 

 little sealing sloop from Connecticut as quietly riding between his ships as if lying in 

 the waters of Long Island Sound. He learned from the captain that the islands were 

 already well known, and that he had just returned from exploring the shores of a new 

 land at the south ; upon which the Russian gave vent to an expression too hard to be 

 repeated, but sufficiently significant of his opinion of American enterprise. After the 

 captain of the sloop, he named the discovery 'Palmer's Land,' in which the American 

 acquiesced, and by this name it appears to be designated on all the recently-published 

 Russian and English charts." A similar experience awaited the English ship Caribou, 

 Captain Cubins, who came in sight of Kurd's Island, and, like the Russian, thought it 

 hitherto unknown land. The similarity was carried still further by the appearance 

 of the schooner Oxford, of Fairhaven (tender to the Arab), the captain of which informed 

 him that the island was discovered by them eighteen months before. 



