COMMON FINBACK WHALE. 223 



That intrepid mariner, Captain John Smith, seems to have been the first to attempt the 

 capture of this species of whale in New England waters. His efforts were confined to the 

 Maine coast about Monhcgan Island. But he met with no success, as his cheerful narrative 

 sets forth. "In the month of April, 1614," he writes, 1 '" with two ships from London, of a 

 lew merchants, I chanced to arrive in New-England, a part of America, at the isle of Mona- 

 higgan, in forty-three and a half of northerly latitude. Our plot was there to take whales, and 

 make trials of a mine of gold and copper. If those failed, fish and furs was then our refuge, 

 to make ourselves savers howsoever. We found this whale-fishing a costly conclusion. We 

 saw many, and spent much time in chasing them; but could not kill any, they being a kind of 

 jubartes, and not the whale that yields fins and oil, as we expected." Evidently the Right 

 Wliales had mostly gone to the north, and the Finbacks only were met with, to the great 

 discomfiture of the resourceful captain and his men who none the less, did make themselves 

 "savers" through trading for furs with the Indians. 



The early whalers of Massachusetts Bay and Cape Cod were well acquainted with the 

 Finback, but generally made no attempt to capture it. Paul Dudley, in his essay on the New 

 England whales (1734, p. 425), writes that it is somewhat longer than the Right Whale "but 

 not so bulky, much swifter, and very furious when struck, and very difficultly held; their Oil 

 is not near so much as that of the Right Whale, and the Bone of little Profit, being short and 

 knobby." Similarly, Hector St. John Crevecoeur, who visited Nantucket at about the period 

 of the Revolution, writes in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782), that the Finback 

 and Sulphurbottom, though familiar to the Nantucket whalers, were never or seldom killed 

 by them, "as being extremely swift," and "the grampus, [Balaenoptera acuto-roslrataf] thirty 

 feet long, never killed on the same account." Nevertheless the sight of such great whales 

 close at hand must often have tempted the hardy whalemen to make hazard with harpoon or 

 lance or even with the musket, if perchance they might capture these swifter species. So, in 

 the Boston News Letter, of September 3d, 1722, is advertised a court of admiralty to be held 

 at Boston on the last Wednesday in the month, to adjudicate on a 'drift-whale' found floating 

 near the Brewsters, and towed ashore in August. It was much wasted and decayed, and on 

 cutting it up a musket ball was found in the carcass, that had doubtless been fired into it and 

 had caused its death. The advertisement notifies the public that "if any Persons can try 

 any Claim to said Whale so as to make out a Property," they shall appear duly at the said 

 court. From the fact that the whale was killed in August it is probable that it was a Balaenop- 

 tera. Doubtless some of the 'drift whales' mentioned in the earlier records were Finbacks, 



'Smith, Capt. John. A Description of New England, London, 1616; reprint in Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc., 1837, ser. 3, 

 vol. 6, p. 103. 



2 J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur. Letters from an American Farmer, London, 1782. Reprint, New York, 1901, see 

 p. 175. 



