THE WHALE FISHERY. 119 



'For some time past, Mr. Speaker/ said Burke, 'has the Old World been fed from the New. The 

 scarcity which you have felt would have been a desolating famine, if this child of your old age 

 if America with a true filial piety, with a Eoinan charity, had not put the full breast of its 

 youthful exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent. Turning from the agricultural resources 

 of the colonies, consider the wealth which they have drawn from the sea by their fisheries. The 

 spirit in which that enterprising employment has feeen exercised ought to raise your esteem and 

 admiration. Pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it? Pass" by the other parts, and look at 

 the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery. Whilst 

 we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the 

 deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis' Straits, whilst we are looking for them 

 beneath the Arctic Circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, 

 that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south. Falkland 

 Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but 

 a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry.* Nor is the equinoctial 

 heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that 

 whilst some of them draw the line and 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 

 by their fisheries. No climate that is not a witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of 

 Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, 

 ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed 

 by this recent people; a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened 

 into the bone, of manhood. When I contemplate these things ; when I know that the colonies 

 in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy 

 form by the constraints of a watchful and suspicious Government, but that, through a wise and 

 salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection ; when I 

 reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of 

 power sink, a ud all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt, and die away within 

 me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.' 



"But eloquence, logic, arguments, facts availed nothing. The bill became a law. In the 

 upper house of Parliament, where a minority fought the bill as determinedly as the minor part of 

 the Commons, fifteen lords entered a protest against it. The island of Nantucket was, for the 

 reasons enumerated, relieved somewhat from its'extremest features, a fact which did not escape 

 the surveillance of the provincial authorities, who in their turn restricted the exportation of pro- 

 visions from any portion of the colonies, save the Massachusetts Bay, to that island, and the 

 Provincial Congress of Massachusetts further prohibited any exportation from that colony, save 

 under certain regulations.! But, like the mother country, the colonies yielded to the behests of 

 humanity and relaxed their stringency in regard to this island. 



"At an early day after the formal opening of the issue of battle between England and the 

 plantations, the general court of Massachusetts passed a resolve, directing ' that from and after 

 the fifteenth Day of August instant, no Ship or Yessell should sail out of any port in this Colony, 

 on any whaling Voyage whatever, without leave first had and obtained from the Great and General 



" "At this time the Falkland Islands were the subject of considerable acrimony between the English, Spanish, and 

 Brazilian Governments. According to Freeman (Hist. Cape Cod, ii, p. 539, note), the people of Truro were the first 

 of our American whalemen to go to the Falklauds. In 1774 Capta. David Smith and Gamaliel Collins, at the sug- 

 gestion of Admiral Montague, of the British navy, made voyages there on that pursuit, in which they were very 

 successful." 



"tMass. Col. SISS., Provincial Congress, i, p. 300." 



