HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN WHALE FISHERY. 61 



or bred in a seaport town since the day it was uttered. " 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 Eoman 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 been exercised ought to raise your esteem 

 aud 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 penetrat- 

 ing 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, aud engaged uuder the frozen serpent of the South. 

 Falkland Island, which seemed too remote aud 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 har- 

 poon 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 dexter 

 ous aud firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most peril 

 ous 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 1 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 aud suspicious Government, 

 but that, through a wise aud 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, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contriv- 

 ances melt, and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon some- 

 thing to the spirit of liberty." 



But eloquence, logic, arguments, facts availed nothing. The bill be- 

 came a law. In the upper house of Parliament, where a minority fought 



* At this time the Falkland Islands were the subject of considerable acrimony be- 

 tween 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 Falklands. Iu 1774 Captains David Smith and Gamaliel Col- 

 lius, at the suggestion of Admiral Montague, of the British navy, made voyages 

 there on that pursuit, in which they were very successful. 



