of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did
Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties
upwards of L1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of
America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world;
sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen
thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth,
at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year importing into our
harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if
there be not something puissant in whaling?

But this is not the half; look again.

I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life,
point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty
years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in
one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way
and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so
continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that whaling may
well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves
pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to
catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many years past
the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and
least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes
which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If
American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage
harbors, let them fire salutes to the honour and glory of the
whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted
between them and the savages. They may celebrate as they will the heroes
of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that
scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were
as great, and greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern. For in their
succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters,
and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin
wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and muskets would
not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old
South Sea Voyages, those things were but the life-time commonplaces of
our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates
three chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the
ship's commo