110 THE OCEAN RIVER 



ful fashion for the express use of shipmasters, with more 

 attention to fact than to fable. 



Most of the ships sailing coastwise along the Atlantic sea- 

 board of North America at this time were delayed as much as 

 three weeks because of their ignorance of the Gulf Stream 

 limits and by not knowing of the countercurrent closer to the 

 shore, and many vessels voyaging between England and New 

 York were hkewise set back in their westward course. But 

 gradually the regular coastwise captains were pooling their 

 experiences and evolving a practical system of pilotage. The 

 tremendous expansion of the whaling industry about this time 

 also brought into the western Atlantic a new kind of sailor 

 whose voyages covered a wide area of the ocean and whose 

 observations and experience added greatly to what was already 

 known of the ocean currents. These whaling captains, who 

 were in many ways the founders of the art of modern naviga- 

 tion, traveled in their search for whales from the Bahamas to 

 the Arctic Sea and from the Carolinas to the Azores, and their 

 sea lore quickly spread among the American transatlantic ship- 

 masters. As a result the merchant captains were able to plan a 

 sailing route from Europe that avoided the easterly stream as 

 far as possible, and thus saved themselves in their westerly 

 passage as much as two weeks of fighting wind and stream. 



The reasons for selecting this westerly route were apparently 

 unknown to the skippers of the English mail packets, who 

 continued to use the more direct but much slower route. Com- 

 plaints were made by the Boston Board of Customs to the 

 Lords of the Treasury in London, and brought to the atten- 

 tion of Benjamin Franklin in 1769, at a time when he was 

 Postmaster General for the colonies. He immediately made 

 inquiries in order to discover the cause of the slowness of the 

 mail packets, and discussed the problem with a Nantucket 

 whaler captain named Timothy Folger, who like the majority 

 of his fellows was well acquainted with the currents of the 



