HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN WHALE FISHERY. 85 



not be a doubt that spermaceti oil might find a market in most of the 

 great cities in Europe which were illuminated in the night, as it is so 

 much better and cheaper than the vegetable oil that is commonly used. 

 The fat of the spermaceti- whale gives the clearest and most beautiful 

 flame of any substance that is known in nature, and we are all surprised 

 that you prefer darkness, and consequent robberies, burglaries, and 

 murders in your streets, to the receiving, as a remittance, our sperma- 

 ceti oil. The lamps around Grosvenor Square, I know, aud in Downing 

 Street, too, I suppose, are dim by midnight, and extinguished by two 

 o'clock ; whereas our oil would burn bright till 9 o'clock in the morning, 

 and chase away, before the watchmen, all the villains, and save you the 

 trouble and danger of introducing a new police into the city."* 



But despite the fact that Mr. Pitt appeared more favorable than was 

 anticipated, Mr. Adams did not expect any immediate response to his 

 propositions. The English ministers in their individual capacity seemed 

 singularly timorous, and manifested much fear of committing themselves 

 before joint cabinet action. Adams inclined to the opinion that nothing 

 short of the convincing eloquence of dire necessity would drive the En- 

 glish ministry from the position they had assumed in regard to the navi- 

 gation act, and that an answer to his propositions, even at a late day, 

 was doubtful, without Congress authorized similar acts with the United 

 States, and these counter-irritants were actually put in force, to deter- 

 mine on which side the inconvenience was greatest. The great cry in 

 the Uuited Kingdom was : " Shall the United States be our ship-carpen- 

 ters"? Shall we depend upon a foreign nation for our navagation 1 ? In 

 case of a war with them, shall we be without ships, or obliged to our 

 enemies for them?" How much this nightmare of inability to cope 

 with their late colonies in anything like a fair field was stimulated by 

 the government is uncertain, but the authorities evidently used no 

 efforts to allay it.t 



The effort to bring about the desired compromise continued, as Mr. 

 Adams had judged it would, all the succeeding fall and winter. In 

 January, 178G, Bowdoin wrote to Adams, in reply to a letter from him, 

 that the navigation act of Massachusetts had been so modified as to be 

 only operative against Great Britain, and copies of the repealing act 

 had been sent to the executives of the other States in order to secure 



* Works of John Adams, viii, pp. 308-309. 



t Iu negotiation with the Portuguese ministers in November, 1785, Mr. Adams asked 

 (viii, p. 340) if they did not want our sperm-oil. He replied that they had olives and 

 made oil from them ; they had no use for their own sperm-oil and sold it to Spain. 

 " They had now," he said, " a very pretty spermaceti-whale fishery, which they had 

 learned of the New Englanders, and carried on upon the coast of Brazil." According 

 to the Boston News-Letter of April 21, 1774, tlfe method of obtaining their knowledge 

 was somewhat open to objections. (See p. 57.) In 1805, the Portuguese attempted to 

 carry on the whaling business from Mozambique, and Timothy Folger, Francis Paddack, 

 William Hull, and John Hillman, of Nantucket, went there to take charge of the fishery ; 

 but early in 1810 accounts were received at Nantucket stating that they had all been 

 taken sick aud died there. 



