THE WHALEBONE WHALES OF THE WESTERN NORTH ATLANTIC. 21 



tude of their boats, and strike him with a bone made in fashion of a harping iron 

 fastened to a rope, which they make great and strong of the bark of trees, which 

 they veer out after him : then all their boats come about him, and as he riseth 

 above water, with their arrows they shoot him to death : when they have killed 

 him and dragged him to shore, they call all their chief lords together, and sing 

 a song of joy : and those chief lords, whom they call sagamores, divide the spoil, 

 and give to every man a share, which pieces so distributed, they hang up about 

 their houses for provision : and when they boil them, they blow off the fat, and 

 put to their pease, maize, and other pulse which they eat." ' 



His landfall seems to have been at Nantucket [Cuerno ?] and he remarks : 



" Here [May 14, 1605] we found great store of excellent codfish, and saw 

 many whales, as we had done two or three days before." [Somewhere near the 

 Island of Cuerno in lat. 41 20'.] 8 



He also includes whales among the profitable things to be found in New 

 England. 3 



These notes furnish no information as to the kind of whales obtained, but in 

 John Smith's account of his voyage to New England in 1614 we find a definite 

 allusion to the Finbacks. He writes: 



[1614. JOHN SMITH'S VOYAGE TO NEW ENGLAND.] 



"In the month of April, 1614, at the charge of Captain Marmaduke Roydon, 

 Captain George Langam, Mr. John Biiley and Mr. William Skelton, with two ships 

 from London, I chanced to arrive at Monahigan [Monhegan] an isle of America, in 

 434 [43 40'] of northerly latitude: our plot was there to take whales, for which 

 we had one Samuel Cramton and divers others expert in that faculty, and also to 

 make trials of a mine of gold and copper ; if those failed, fish and furs were 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 imbartes, and not the whale that yields fins and 

 oil, as we expected ; for our gold it was rather the master's device to get a voyage 

 that projected it, than any knowledge he had at all of any such matter ; fish and 

 furs were now our guard, and by our late arrival and long lingering about the 

 whale, the prime of both those seasons were past ere we perceived it, we thinking 

 that their seasons served at all times, but we found it otherwise, for by the midst 

 of June the fishing failed, yet in July and August some were taken, but not suf- 

 ficient to defray so great a charge as our stay required : of dry fish we made about 

 forty thousand, of cor-fish about seven thousand." 4 



1 Waymouth's Voyage in the Discovery of the Land of Virginia, written by James Rosier. 

 London, 1605. Mass. Hist. Coll. (3), 8, p. 156. 



Ofi.dt.p. 131. 



>0p.cit.,p. 157. 



'SMITH, J., General History of New England. Pinkerton's Voyages, 13, 1812, p. 207. 



Starbuck puts the matter in a somewhat different light, remarking that Smith " found whales 

 so plentiful along the coast that he turned from the primary object of his voyage to pursue them." 

 There appears to be nothing in the original narrative just quoted to justify this view. STARBUCK, 

 History of the American Whale Fishery. Rept. U. S. Fish Com., pt. 4, 1878, p. 5, foot-note. 



