gained thriftily in the Levant. The whalers of
Nantucket, in their apple-bowed barks, explored and hunted in distant
seas, and the smoke of their try-pots darkened the waters of Baffin Bay,
Guinea, and Brazil. It was they who inspired Edmund Burke's familiar
eulogy: "No sea but is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not
a witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland nor the
activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of England ever
carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which
it has been pushed by this recent people--a people who are still, as it
were, but in the gristle and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood."

In 1762, seventy-eight whalers cleared from American ports, of which
more than half were from Nantucket. Eight years later there were one
hundred and twenty-five whalers out of Nantucket which took 14,331
barrels of oil valued at $358,200. In size these vessels averaged no
more than ninety tons, a fishing smack of today, and yet they battered
their way half around the watery globe and comfortably supported six
thousand people who dwelt on a sandy island unfit for farming and having
no other industries. Every Nantucket lad sailed for his "lay" or share
of the catch and aspired to command eventually a whaler of his own.

Whaler, merchantman, and slaver were training a host of incomparable
seamen destined to harry the commerce of England under the new-born
Stars and Stripes, and now, in 1775, on the brink of actual war,
Parliament flung a final provocation and aroused the furious enmity of
the fishermen who thronged the Grand Bank. Lord North proposed to forbid
the colonies to export fish to those foreign markets in which every
seacoast village was vitally concerned, and he also contemplated driving
the fishing fleets from their haunts off Newfoundland. This was to rob
six thousand sturdy men of a livelihood afloat and to spread ruin among
the busy ports, such as Marblehead and Gloucester, from which sailed
hundreds of pinks, snows, and schooners. This measure became law
notwithstanding the protests of twenty-one peers of the realm who
declared: "We dissent because the attempt to coerce by famine the whole
body of the inhabitants of great and populous provinces is without
example in the history of this, or perhaps, of any civilized nation."

The sailormen bothered their heads very little about taxation without
representation but whetted their