176 SOUTH SEA FISHERY. 



market quotations of November 1835. Sperm oil, 

 <.75 per ton. Greenland, .40. South Sea oil, 

 .42. Pale seal, 43. Whalebone from northern 

 fishery, .250 per ton. Whalebone from southern 

 fishery, ,145, 



The Americans for a long time have prosecuted 

 this trade with great vigour, and more success per- 

 haps than any other people. They commenced it in 

 1690, and for about fifty years found an abundant 

 supply of fish on their own shores ; but the whales 

 having abandoned these resorts, the American navi- 

 gators entered with extraordinary ardour into the 

 fisheries carried on in the northern and southern 

 oceans. Mr. Burke, in his famous speech on Ame- 

 rican affairs in 1 774, adverted to this wonderful dis- 

 play of daring enterprise as follows : " While we 

 are carrying on the whale fishery under the Arctic 

 circle, we hear that they have pierced into the op- 

 posite region of Polar cold ; that they are at the 

 antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of 

 the south. Falkland island, which seems too re- 

 mote and too romantic an object for the grasp of 

 national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place 

 for their victorious industry. Nor is the equatorial 

 heat more discouraging to them than the accumu- 

 lated winter of both poles. We learn, that when 

 some of them draw the line or strike the harpoon 

 on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude and 

 pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. 

 No sea but what is vexed with their fisheries. No 

 climate that is not witness of their toil. Neither 



