214 * The Atlantic 



land, Baker Islands and Kingman Reef are among those that were 

 discovered this way. Some of the information collected by captains 

 on lonely whaling voyages was very useful to us in our late war in 

 the Pacific. 



An old friend of mine, Andy Furuseth of the Seaman's Union, 

 once said: "Ships are the tools of seamen." The truth of his remark 

 was never better illustrated than in the matter of the whaleboat and 

 its equipment. These were the developments of seamen. No prescrip- 

 tion by law, made at a distance, could have produced them. They 

 were the natural evolutionary products of a life-and-death struggle. 

 They were produced on the spot by alert and ingenious men whose 

 very existence depended upon the precision and effectiveness of the 

 tools and functions that they worked out for themselves. 



As long as the whale had to be hunted — and the whole fabric of 

 society ashore for some centuries assumed and accepted the existence 

 of all the products derived from whale hunting — organs and func- 

 tions that whalemen evolved for themselves were the best compro- 

 mise possible between the urge for personal survival and the need 

 for getting the job done. From both points of view, the solutions to 

 the problem that the whalemen themselves arrived at were so suc- 

 cessful that an attempt at interference by legislation would not only 

 have lessened the capacity to get the job done but also have increased 

 the hazards of the chase. 



Just as legislation would have been of no avail, so would individual 

 invention, at best, have been of dubious assistance. The successful 

 solutions were the product of group activity and teamwork. Here 

 was a case where a test under laboratory conditions was impossible. 

 Every instrument and its function had to be tested not only in the 

 field of battle but actually at the firing line. A good and clear dia- 

 gram of a whaleboat and its equipment in place will do something 

 to reveal the intricate character of the equipment required to ap- 

 proach and harpoon a whale, but it requires more than this to under- 

 stand the way in which it was used — the carefully worked out opera- 

 tions of the six-man crew, each of whom had a predetermined series 

 of operations to perform, which varied according to a number of dif- 

 ferent situations that might arise during the progress of the chase. 



The best way to arrive at some understanding of these matters is 

 to visit a marine museum such as the one at Mystic, Connecticut, or 

 the Whaling Museum at New Bedford. Here, whaleboats and their 

 equipment can be studied in detail. The New Bedford Museum in- 

 cludes a model of a whaling ship done to one-half natural size and 



