stowing 4181 barrels of
a value of $109,269. The Pioneer of New London, Captain Ebenezer Morgan,
was away only a year and stocked a cargo of oil and whalebone which sold
for $150,060. Most of the profits of prosperous voyages were taken
as the owners' share, and the incomes of the captain and crew were
so niggardly as to make one wonder why they persisted in a calling so
perilous, arduous, and poorly paid. During the best years of whaling,
when the ships were averaging $16,000 for a voyage, the master received
an eighteenth, or about nine hundred dollars a year. The highly skilled
hands, such as the boat-steerers and harpooners, had a lay of only one
seventy-fifth, or perhaps a little more than two hundred dollars cash as
the reward of a voyage which netted the owner at least fifty per cent on
his investment. Occasionally they fared better than this and sometimes
worse. The answer to the riddle is that they liked the life and had
always the gambling spirit which hopes for a lucky turn of the cards.

The countless episodes of fragile boats smashed to kindling by fighting
whales, of the attack renewed with harpoon and lance, of ships actually
rammed and sunk, would fill a volume by themselves and have been
stirringly narrated in many a one. Zanzibar and Kamchatka, Tasmania and
the Seychelles knew the lean, sun-dried Yankee whaleman and his motto of
a "dead whale or a stove boat." The Civil War did not drive him from the
seas. The curious fact is that his products commanded higher prices
in 1907 than fifty years before, but the number of his ships rapidly
decreased. Whales were becoming scarce, and New England capital
preferred other forms of investment. The leisurely old sailing craft was
succeeded by the steam whaler, and the explosive bomb slew, instead of
the harpoon and lance hurled by the sinewy right arm of a New Bedford
man or Cape Verde islander.

Roving whaler and armed East Indiaman, plunging packet ship and stately
clipper, they served their appointed days and passed on their several
courses to become mere memories, as shadowy and unsubstantial as the
gleam of their own topsails when seen at twilight. The souls of their
sailors have fled to Fiddler's Green, where all dead mariners go. They
were of the old merchant marine which contributed something fine and
imperishable to the story of the United States. Down the wind, vibrant
and deep-throated, comes their own refrain for a requiem:

We're outward bound