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