PARENTAGE OF THE JARGON. 5 
upon a lading and a market. First of these came the whalers, three 
years the normal term of their voyages from the southern ice cap to 
the gelid barriers of the north and searching all the warm parallels 
of the equatorial seas between these frozen extremes, their prey the 
right whale and the cachalot. How they crowded these waters after 
exploration had opened the hidden secrets may be seen in one of the 
dashing exploits of not the least of those captains courageous who 
made the American navy great when it was a fleet of wood and snowy 
canvas and stout hearts: Commodore David Porter cut himself 
loose from orders, drove the Essex around Cape Horn, harried the 
Pacific until he had driven off all the Dundee whalemen. Before his 
work was done he was flag officer of a squadron of prizes armed to 
fight with him so deep in its draft upon his wardroom country that 
David Glasgow Farragut was in command of a fighting ship while 
yet he was a midshipmite.* How long the whaling industry con- 
tinued at a profit in these remote seas may be estimated from the 
fact that, in his exhaustive studies of log books from the Pacific, 
Matthew Fontaine Maury found the data from which to compile a 
chart of the whales known to frequent those waters, and, even before 
they had sailed from Fairhaven, from Nantucket or the Vineyard, 
thus to direct the eager hunters to the most profitable feeding- 
grounds. This was as late as the years just preceding the war in 
which the call of his native State drew this great Virginian from the 
science of oceanography, which he had discovered, and wasted him 
in the clash of arms. 
To any one familiar with the sea under conditions of voyaging 
where the hand is prompt to throw the spoke to meet the flicker of 
the after leach of some sail far aloft, it will be readily comprehensible 
that in the whaling fleet we are to find little of the beginnings of our 
Beach-la-mar. Other ships take the sea bound ‘‘from and toward,”’ to 
cite the prepositions duly entered on the pages of every log book. 
It is port which they are seeking, the sea is but the way. But port 

*We may not omit a brief note of a forgotten chapter of our national history. Our 
widely scattered possessions in the Pacific, colonies or dependencies or whatever name 
may be assumed to make constitutional the fruit of war, Hawaii, Wake Island, Guam, the 
Philippines, and Samoa, belong to us by title deeds little advanced into their second 
decade. Only a few days short of a century ago Commodore Porter, neglected when not 
pursued by the active spite of the Commissioners of the Navy, foresaw the Pacific needs 
of those United States which had only in outposts here and there reached the Missis- 
sippi. In the course of these operations of the Essex he annexed the Marquesas by 
solemn act of national sovereignty. This deed of wise prescience was neglected, not even 
disowned. On the site of Fort Madison at his newly founded capital city of Washington- 
ville in the Bay of Taiohae in Nukahiva I have delved in vain for the bottled and buried 
copy of the proclamation of annexation. The filed copy has vanished from the government 
archives; we may draw the conclusion that it fluttered into the waste paper basket from 
the hands of that Secretary of State whose name is forever attached to the Monroe 
Doctrine as—after Washington’s ‘“‘avoid all entangling alliances’’—the first formula of 
our foreignpolicy. This history is most obscure. The result of a very close study of the 
records is presented by Commander E. L. Beach, U.S. N., in “ The Pioneer of America’s 
Pacific Empire: David Porter,’ in‘‘ United States Naval Institute Proceedings XXXIV.” 
