HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN WHALE FISHERY. 5 



oil and bone came daily alongside and played about the ship. The master 

 and bis mate, and others experienced in fishing, preferred it to the 

 Greenland whale fishery, and asserted that were they provided with the 

 proper implements, £300 or £400 worth of oil might be obtained." 4th. 

 The situation was healthy, secure, and defensible. 5th. It was in the 

 depth of winter and inexpedient to look further.* Coming from En- 

 gland, as the vast majority of the early settlers did, where the value of 

 the fisheries had already assumed considerable importance, it would 

 have been strange if they had failed to have appreciated this important 

 feature of their surroundings. 



At this time the whales were very numerous both along the coast and 

 in deep water.t Their habits seem to have been somewhat migratory, 

 as the boat-whaling season usually commenced very regularly early in 

 November and ceased in March or April. According to some writers, 

 the Iudians, before the advent of the whites, were accustomed to pursue 

 the whales in their canoes, and occasionally succeeded in harassing them 

 to death. Their weapons consisted of a rude wooden harpoon, to which 

 was attached a line with a wooden float at the end,t and the method of 

 attack was to plunge their instruments of torture into.the body of the 

 whale whenever he came to the surface of the water to breathe. In 

 Waymouth's journal of his voyage to America in 1G05,§ in describing 

 the Indians on the coast, he says : "One especial thing is their manner 

 of killing the whale, which they call powdawe ; and will describe his 

 form ; how he bloweth up the water ; and that he is twelve fathoms long : 

 and that they go in company of their king with a multitude 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 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 pro- 

 visions; and when they boil them they blow off the fat and put to their 

 pease, maize, and other pulse which they eat." Among the Indians of 

 Rhode Island it was the custom when a whale was cast ashore or killed 

 within their jurisdiction, to cut the flesh into pieces and send to the 



* Thatcher's Hist, of Plymouth, p. 21. 



t Capt. John Smith, in 1614, found whales so plentiful along the coast that he turned 

 aside from the primary object of his voyage to pursue them. Richard Mather, who 

 came over to the Massachusetts Bay in 1635, records in his journal of the voyage seeing 

 near New England " mighty whales spewing up water in the air, like the smoke of a 

 ehimuey, and making the sea about them white and hoary, as is said in Job, of such 

 incredible bigness that I will never wonder that the body of Jonas could be in the belly 

 of a whale." (Sabine's Report, p. 42.) 



t " Etchings of a Whaling Cruise," Browne, p. 522. 



$ Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., iii series, viii vol., 156 p. 



