PART III -THE AMERICAN WHALE-FISHERY. 
CHAPTER I. 
ORIGIN AND ANCIENT MODE OF WIIALE-FISHING. 
Before entering upon the history of the American "Whale-fishery, we will intro- 
duce a few remarks relative to the origin and prosecution of whaling in other 
quarters of the world. If we go back to the time of the early Grecian sailors, and 
follow through the maritime history of every nation, there appears to be no posi- 
tive record as to the time when, or place where, whale -fishing originated. In the 
collection of various whaling and exploring voyages which we have perused, nearly 
all the authors agree that the Basques and Biscayans were the first to capture 
whales as a regular commercial pursuit. Eminent writers, however, maintain that 
the Norwegians were the first to pursue those leviathans of the deep, and that they 
carried on a fishery long before any other European nation. It may be possible 
that the Norwegians were the first who made the whale-fishery a legitimate busi- 
ness. This, however, seems to be very doubtful, when we look to the shores of 
Japan and Chinese Tartary, where, ever since we have been in possession of an}' 
reliable knowledge of that region and its inhabitants, we know that the Japanese 
and Tartars have successfully pursued the whale in large boats from their shores. 
Among the American authorities relative to the foreign whale-fishery is the Hon. 
J. Ross Browne, who, having had recourse to the Congressional Library at the time 
of compiling his Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, and History of the Whale-fishery, 
has given, in the appendix to that work, a concise and somewhat chronologi- 
cal account of whaling commerce, beginning as early as 887, and following down 
to the present century, from which we shall quote numerous statistics of that 
eminent writer, as also extracts from the works of other authors. 
"As early as 887, according to Anderson (in his Historical and Chronological 
Maeine Mammals. — 24. [185] 
