tness to maintain an agricultural people. There is a
legend that an islander, weary perhaps with the effort of trying to wrest
a livelihood from the unwilling soil, looked from a hilltop at the whales
tumbling and spouting in the ocean. "There," he said, "is a green pasture
where our children's grandchildren will go for bread." Whether the
prophecy was made or not, the event occurred, for before the Revolution
the American whaling fleet numbered 360 vessels, and in the banner year of
the industry, 1846, 735 ships engaged in it, the major part of the fleet
hailing from Nantucket. The cruises at first were toward Greenland after
the so-called right whales, a variety of the cetaceans which has an added
commercial value because of the baleen, or whalebone, which hangs in great
strips from the roof of its mouth to its lower jaw, forming a sort of
screen or sieve by which it sifts its food out of prodigious mouthfuls of
sea water. This most enormous of known living creatures feeds upon very
small shell-fish, swarm in the waters it frequents. Opening wide its
colossal mouth, a cavity often more than fifteen feet in length, and so
deep from upper to lower jaw that the flexible sheets of whalebone,
sometimes ten feet long, hang straight without touching its floor, it
takes a great gulp of water. Then the cavernous jaws slowly close,
expelling the water through the whalebone sieve, somewhat as a Chinese
laundryman sprinkles clothes, and the small marine animals which go to
feed that prodigious bulk are caught in the strainer. The right whale is
from 45 to 60 feet long in its maturity, and will yield about 15 tons of
oil and 1500 weight of whalebone, though individuals have been known to
give double this amount.

Most of the vessels which put out of Nantucket and New Bedford, in the
earliest days of the industry, after whales of this sort, were not fitted
with kettles and furnaces for trying out the oil at the time of the catch,
as was always the custom in the sperm-whale fishery. Their prey was near
at hand, their voyages comparatively short. So the fat, dripping, reeking
blubber was crammed into casks, or some cases merely thrown into the
ship's hold, just as it was cut from the carcass, and so brought back
weeks later to the home port--a shipload of malodorous putrefaction. Old
sailors who have cruised with cargoes of cattle, of green hides, and of
guano, say that nothing that ever offended the olfactories of man equals
the sten