The Whalers : 203 



Long Island as early as 1640 and Southampton, Cold Spring Harbor, 

 Huntington, Greenport and other towns began sending out vessels. 



It is claimed that a brigantine named the Happy Return sailed from 

 Boston in command of Captain Timotheus Vanderuen in 1688 and 

 was the first American ship to undertake a cruise after whales. Until 

 ships began to sail in deep waters the whales that they captured were 

 all of the smaller species, as we have already noted in the cases of 

 the Flemish and Basque fishermen, the early Norse whalers and oth- 

 ers. 



Any reader of history knows that local tradition is not always to 

 be trusted. The local story about the first catch of sperm whale goes 

 like this. In 1712 Christopher Hussey of Nantucket was out after 

 whales around the shores of the island. He was blown offshore by a 

 strong gale from the west and, when this abated, he was at sea and 

 surrounded by a large school of sperm whales. When he returned to 

 Nantucket his little ship had one large sperm whale in tow. The story 

 is at least accurate as to time, for deep-sea cruises for large whales 

 began to leave the New England and Long Island coast early in the 

 eighteenth century. The big whales that were the most sought after 

 during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when whaling was 

 at its height, were found either in the Arctic or Antarctic, or in the 

 warmer waters of the great oceans. 



The chief of the cold water whales was the right whale. The rea- 

 son he was given this name was that he was equipped with special 

 organs that made him more valuable to the hunter than any other 

 whale. The material that he furnished which was so priceless to 

 organized society was called "whalebone." Also, in the markets 

 ashore, it was known as "whale-fin." 



Like most of the other names that are attached to whaling, the term 

 itself is erroneous and misleading — just as the term "fisheries" is 

 misleading and also the term black "fish." The whales, of course, are 

 not fish at all. They are mammals like a horse or a cow or a human 

 being. They are very specialized mammals that, in the course of 

 adapting themselves to living in the oceans, have undergone a num- 

 ber of strange evolutionary changes. One of these changes is the dis- 

 appearance from the outside of the animal of any structures that 

 could be called legs, but a dissection of a whale would reveal rela- 

 tively small bones that represented rudimentary legs. Another change 

 was in the enormous size of the whale's mouth and the peculiar 

 structure of the whale's head. 



