American merchant sailor
upon which none will wish to linger, and yet which can not be ignored. In
prosecuting the search for slaves and their markets he showed the
qualities of daring, of fine seamanship, of pertinacity, which have
characterized him in all his undertakings; but the brutality, the greed,
the inhumanity inseparable from the slave-trade make the participation of
Americans in it something not pleasant to enlarge upon. It was, as I have
said, not until the days of the Civil War blockade that the traffic was
wholly destroyed. As late as 1860 the yacht "Wanderer," flying the New
York Yacht Club's flag, owned by a club member, and sailing under the
auspices of a member of one of the foremost families of the South, made
several trips, and profitable ones, as a slaver. No armed vessel thought
to overhaul a trim yacht, flying a private flag, and on her first trip her
officers actually entertained at dinner the officers of a British cruiser
watching for slavers on the African coast. But her time came, and when in
1860 the slaver, Nathaniel Gordon, a citizen of Portland, Maine, was
actually hanged as a pirate, the death-blow of the slave-trade was struck.
Thereafter the end came swiftly.

**Transcriber's Note: Page 91: changed preeminance to preeminence

CHAPTER IV

THE WHALING INDUSTRY--ITS EARLY DEVELOPMENT IN NEW ENGLAND--KNOWN TO THE
ANCIENTS--SHORE WHALING--BEGINNINGS OF THE DEEP-SEA FISHERIES--THE PRIZES
OF WHALING--PIETY OF ITS EARLY PROMOTERS--THE RIGHT WHALE AND THE
CACHALOT--A FLURRY--SOME FIGHTING WHALES--THE "ESSEX" AND THE "ANN
ALEXANDER"--TYPES OF WHALERS--DECADENCE OF THE INDUSTRY--EFFECT OF OUR
NATIONAL WARS--THE EMBARGO--SOME STORIES OF WHALING LIFE.

In the old "New England Primer," on which the growing minds of Yankee
infants in the early days of the eighteenth century were regaled, appears
a clumsy woodcut of a spouting whale, with these lines of excellent piety
but doubtful rhyme:

Whales in the sea
Their Lord obey.

It is significant of the part which the whale then played in domestic
economy that his familiar bulk should be utilized to "point a moral and
adorn a tale" in the most elementary of books for the instruction of
children. And indeed by the time the "New England Primer" was published,
with its quaint lettering and rude illustrations, the whale fishery had
come to be one of the chief occupations of the seafaring men of the North
Atlantic States. The pursuit of