s went
after him. In the earliest colonial days the carcasses of whales were
frequently found stranded on the beaches of Cape Cod and Long Island. Old
colonial records are full of the lawsuits growing out of these pieces of
treasure-trove, the finder, the owner of the land where the gigantic
carrion lay stranded, and the colony all claiming ownership, or at least
shares. By 1650 all the northern colonies had begun to pursue the business
of shore whaling to some extent. Crews were organized, boats kept in
readiness on the beach, and whenever a whale was sighted they would put
off with harpoons and lances after the huge game, which, when slain, would
be towed ashore, and there cut up and tried out, to the accompaniment of a
prodigious clacking of gulls and a widely diffused bad smell. This method
of whaling is still followed at Amagansett and Southampton, on the shore
of Long Island, though the growing scarcity of whales makes catches
infrequent. In the colonial days, however, it was a source of profit
assiduously cultivated by coastwise communities, and both on Long Island
and Cape Cod citizens were officially enjoined to watch for whales off
shore. Whales were then seen daily in New York harbor, and in 1669 one
Samuel Maverick recorded in a letter that thirteen whales had been taken
along the south shore during the winter, and twenty in the spring.

Little by little the boat voyages after the leviathans extended further
into the sea as the industry grew and the game became scarce and shy. The
people of Cape Cod were the first to begin the fishery, and earliest
perfected the art of "saving" the whale--that is, of securing all of
value in the carcass. But the people of the little island of Nantucket
brought the industry to its highest development, and spread most widely
the fame of the American whaleman. Indeed, a Nantucket whaler laden with
oil was the first vessel flying the Stars and Stripes that entered a
British port. It is of a sailor on this craft that a patriotic anecdote,
now almost classic, is told. He was unhappily deformed, and while passing
along a Liverpool street was greeted by a British tar with a blow on his
"humpback" and the salutation: "Hello, Jack! What you got there?" "Bunker
Hill, d----n ye!" responded the Yankee. "Think you can climb it?" Far out
at sea, swept ever by the Atlantic gales, a mere sand-bank, with scant
surface soil to support vegetation, this island soon proved to its
settlers its unfi