neutrality, and by town meeting voted to accede to the
British demand that her people pay no taxes for the support of the United
States. In all essential things the island ceased to be a part of the
United States, its people neither rendering military service nor
contributing to the revenues. But their submission to the British demands
did not save the whale-trade, for repeated efforts to get the whalers
declared neutral and exempt from capture failed.

Half a century of peace followed, during which the whaling industry rose
to its highest point; but was again on the wane when the Civil War let
loose upon the remaining whalemen the Confederate cruisers, the
"Shenandoah" alone burning thirty-four of them. From this last stroke the
industry, enfeebled by the lessened demand for its chief product, and by
the greater cost and length of voyages resulting from the growing scarcity
of whales, never recovered. To-day its old-time ports are deserted by
traffic. Stripped of all that had salable value, its ships rot on
mud-banks or at moldering wharves. The New England boy, whose ambition
half a century ago was to ship on a whaler, with a boy's lay and a
straight path to the quarter-deck, now goes into a city office, or makes
for the West as a miner or a railroad man. The whale bids fair to become
as extinct as the dodo, and the whaleman is already as rare as the
buffalo.

[Illustration: "ROT AT MOLDERING WHARVES"]

With the extension of the fishing-grounds to the Pacific began the really
great days of the whale fishery. Then, from such a port as Nantucket or
New Bedford a vessel would set out, to be gone three years, carrying with
her the dearest hopes and ambitions of all the inhabitants. Perhaps there
would be no house without some special interest in her cruise. Tradesmen
of a dozen sorts supplied stores on shares. Ambitious boys of the best
families sought places before the mast, for there was then no higher goal
for youthful ambition than command of a whaler. Not infrequently a captain
would go direct from the marriage altar to his ship, taking a young bride
off on a honeymoon of three years at sea. Of course the home conditions
created by this almost universal masculine employment were curious. The
whaling towns were populated by women, children, and old men. The talk of
the street was of big catches and the prices of oil and bone. The
conversation in the shaded parlors, where sea-shells, coral, and the
trophies of Pacifi