96 REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND FISHERIES. 



advanced li^antucket so rapidly served to stimulate other ports, and New 

 York, Long Island, New Loudon, Cape Cod, Boston, and more particu- 

 larly New Bedford, entered more vigorously into competition,* and but 

 a few years elapsed before the latter port, which was an offshoot, a child 

 as it were of Nantucket, had far outstripped the extremest growth of 

 the parent. In the mean time the same love of adventure, the same 

 longing to explore new fields, the same yearning to more speedily return 

 home with a full cargo, that sent our whalemen from home to the West 

 Indies and the Cape de Verdes, from the Cape de Verdes to the shores of 

 Africa and Brazil, to the Falklands and the coast of Patagonia, from 

 Patagonia to the Pacific coast of South America, urged them still 

 further.! In 1818 Capt. George W. Gardner, in the ship Globe of Nan- 

 tucket, steering west from the old track, found, in latitude 5° to IC^ 

 south and longitude 105^ to 125° west, a cruising ground where the 

 objects of his search seemed to exist in almost countless numbers. This 

 he termed the " Off"-shore Ground," and, within two years, more than 

 fifty ships were whaling in the same locality. 



The next cruising ground was off the coast of Japan. Having received 

 word from Captain Winship, of Brighton, Mass., who had friends at 

 Nantucket, that on a recent voyage from China to the Sandwich Islands 

 he had seen large numbers of sperm-whales on that coast. Captain 

 Joseph Allen, in the ship Maro, was dispatched there in the fall of 1819. 

 In 1821 six or seven ships were cruising in this vicinity, and in the fol- 

 lowing year | more than thirty visited that field. 



The grouping of whalemen upon the various grounds as they were 

 discovered soon caused the slaughter or dispersion of the whales, and 

 as a necessary consequence new fields must be opened up to supply the 

 demand that had become rapacious. Since the close of the war of 1812, 

 not only had the number of vessels in the various recognized whaling 

 ports become greatly augmented, but every year witnessed the creation 

 of new ports from whence this crusade against the whale was relent- 

 lessly pursued. Our vessels spread in their courses rapidly to all parts 

 of the Pacific, and hundreds of islands received their first visit from 



trade of the island ; the small number of inhabitants it contains, and that the island 

 itself is but a speck upon the bordering waters of our republic ; and moreover, that 

 almost the^Yhole of their shipping was captured or destroyed so lately as the last war; 

 we are struck with admiration at the invincible hardihood and industry of this little 

 active, enterprising and frienilly community, whose harpoons have penetrated with 

 success every nook and corner of every ocean." — (Niles' Register, December 2, 1820.) 



* This competition was also entered into by France and England, more particularly by 

 the latter. (Macy, 214. j 



t Capt. George Swain, 2d, of the ship Independence, which sailed from Nantucket 

 in 1817, asserted, on the return from his voyage in 1819, that no ship would ever fill 

 with sperm-oil again. A similar assertion had been made in 1789, when the ship Ranger, 

 Captain William Swain, returned to Nantucket with a cargo of over 1,000 barrels of 

 whale-oil. Her captain thought no other vessel would ever succeed in obtaining sc 

 large a cargo. 



tThe Maro returned in March, 1822, with 2,425 barrels of sperm-oil. 



