66 COMMERCE, NAVIGATION AND FISHERIES. 



to the comparative neglect of the central portions, though much of the lat- 

 ter is arable and sufficiently fertile. It is of course known to all that the 

 bulk of the population of the towns of Brookhaven, Smithtown, and Hunt- 

 ington on the north, and Babylon, Islip and Brookhaven on the south, in- 

 habit the regions lying within a few miles from the shores respectively of 

 the Sound and Bay, while large tracts in the middle section are still given 

 up to pine forests or scrub-oak plains. This peculiarity of the topographi- 

 cal distribution of Suffolk County's population may be attributed, 

 primarily, to the fact that its early settlers were fishermen 

 and were naturallv drawn to the water side in preference 

 to the interior. That they began the catching of fish for their own 

 tables as soon as they landed may be said to be past doubt. While for 

 many years no records exist to show what progress was made in this indus- 

 try, it is reasonably certain that from the first they took out of the waters 

 by their doors not only enough of food for present needs but also quant tics 

 to be salted, smoked or dried for winter use. This would be likely enough 

 in the nature of things, but its probability is increased toward certainty 

 when we find from the records that with the first year of their settlement the 

 Southampton people commenced the pursuit of whales in boats from the 

 shore. How great a degree of hardihood and courage, of pluck and per- 

 sistence, was needed to prosecute this conquest of Leviathan, \vith such 

 rough boats or canoes and such inadequate gear as was then at hand, bold- 

 ly chasing him out to sea, striking him with their rude harpoons and lances, 

 holding tenaciously to their warps as he dragged them over the boiling 

 surges for miles on miles, watching warily his death flurries, and then toil- 

 somely towing his huge bulk to the shore, only those can estimate who, as 

 I have done, have seen this mightiest game which any nimrod of land or 

 sea pursues, stretched upon the sand and rolling grandly in the surf. 



As early as 1644 the male inhabitants of that town were divided into four 

 squadrons, each having a ward or division of the beach to watch. Starbuck, 

 the author of the only complete and comprehensive History df the American 

 Whale Fishery, in a private note to liiyself, says : "I. look upon the set- 

 tlers of Southampton and vicinity as among the first, if not the first, in our 

 country, to pursue the art of whaling as an organized industry, as will ap- 

 pear in my own work — pp. 9, 10, 11, etc. He there records this fact, con- 

 clusive of'both the antiquity and the importance of the business, that " In 

 1672 the towns of Southampton, East-Hampton, and Southold presented a 

 memorial to the court at Whitehall, in which, as the ground for an appeal 

 from Dutch oppression, they set forth that they have spent much lime and 

 pains, and the greater part of their estates, in settling the trade of whale 

 fishing in the adjacent seas, having endeavored it above these 20 years but 

 could not bring it to any perfection till within these 2 or 3 years last past. " 

 This shows that prior to 1652 the whale fishery along the south shore of 

 the Island had become a settled and a diligently prosecuted industry. Mr. 

 Egbert T. Smith informs me that in 1700 Martha Tunstall Smith, wife of 

 his ancestor Gol. Smith, owned a whaling station at Smith's Point, manned 

 by a crew of Indians who on an average killed 20 whales of a winter, and 

 sent their oil and bone to England. In 1850 he himself established a sta- 

 tion at which the crew had good success. In 1703, Lord Cornbury. Gov 

 ernor of the Province, moved thereto by the fact that no whale oil was sent 

 to New York from eastern Long Island, whence, as he says, "the 

 greater quantity" of it then came, wrote to the Lords of Trade in England 



