Adventures of the Explorers 151 



South America, and when Captain Shields found 

 himself on the Brazil coast too late in the season, 

 he braced his yards on the port tack and stood 

 down to south' ard, bound for Cape Horn. 



The luck that follows on enterprise came to 

 Captain Shields. He found the west coast a 

 "greasy" ground, and First Mate Archilaus 

 Hammond was the first white man to drive a lance 

 under the shoulder-blade of a whale in the Pacific 

 Ocean. The Amelia returned to London full of 

 oil in September, 1790. 



The story told by Shields reached Nantucket 

 and New Bedford before the end of the year, 

 and in 1791 six or seven ships sailed from these 

 two ports for the new grounds. 



Soon so many ships were haunting these grounds 

 that the whales were killed or driven off. Cap- 

 tain George Swain, 2d, of Nantucket, who sailed 

 thither in 1817, declared on his return, two years 

 later, that, although he had saved 1388 barrels 

 of sperm oil and 568 of whale oil, no ship would 

 ever again fill with sperm on that coast. Captain 

 George W. Gardner, commanding the Globe, of 

 Nantucket, sailed in 1818 for those grounds, in 



