400 APPENDIX R 



ages, a large proportion of which could not return in less than 

 twelve months. Many of the vessels were captured by British cruis- 

 ers, and the business was broken up. With returning peace, the 

 indomitable enterprise and energy of the American re-asserted its 

 superiority in this congenial field of adventure, and soon the sails 

 of our whalemen whitened every sea, until in forty years they had 

 appropriated the business, and the fleets of England, Holland, and 

 France had passed from the scene. But the time came when civil 

 war crippled our hands, and we were powerless to protect a busi- 

 ness which girdled the earth, and compassed every sea. Then a 

 people who habitually shrunk from encounter with the whale, 

 and who grudged our prosperity in a field they were confessedly 

 incapable of, launched a swift steamer, manned, armed, and equip- 

 ped for a piratical cruise, and coaled and refitted in their distant 

 colonies. And, to England's shame and our great wrong, the ac- 

 cursed Shenandoah proceeded to war against defenseless whalemen, 

 and amidst the ice of the Arctic applied the incendiary torch to 

 thirty-four American whale-ships, regardless of the announcement, 

 with evidence, that the War of the Rebellion was ended. 



Thus at a blow was destroyed a fleet which England's entire 

 marine could not have re-manned. To secure to herself a coveted 

 carrying-trade through her Alabamas; to surprise in distant seas 

 and ruthlessly burn our whale-ships, against which she could only 

 thus compete; to destroy a business she lacked the courage to 

 prosecute, were part of the bitter ends of British neutrality. Parch- 

 ment patches over such rents may satisfy commerce, but the mem- 

 ory of the last war of England on American whalemen must re- 

 main as an heir-loom to the sons of every father who ever swung 

 in a whale-boat, or wielded the harpoon and lance, 



