VOLUME XXXIV

NUMBER 3

Y

EARS ago the whaling busi

ness was one of the most important and lucrative industries in New England, the seaports of New Bedford, Nantucket and Provincetown being the hailing ports of most of the vessels engaged in that occupation. In the early In the early settlement of Provincetown, on the tip end of Cape Cod, whaling was carried on from the shore by boats. Right whales then used to visit the harbor, but it has now been many years since one was taken there. As the whales became scarce, vessels were fitted out and the industry grew, and kept growing until Provincetown alone boasted of a fleet of fifty-six vessels-barks, brigs and schooners, staunch seagoing craft, that sailed from her harbor. In those days a captain might pick his crew from among his own neighbors, and the interest manifested in the success of a voyage was far greater than in the harum-scarum crews in after years scraped from the refuse of creation.

So many whalers are fitting out this year, particularly from New Bedford which of late years has become the one New England port that supports that industry, that it would seem as though this prostrated "American industry" were about to awaken to something like its old-time vigor. Years of more or less desultory whaling have given the leviathans of the deep a chance to recuperate and that they were not guilty of race suicide during their time of rest is proved by the fact that whales are plentiful in all seas again. There are already twenty-three New Bedford vessels. on the whaling grounds, all of them. reported as doing well, and thirteen more are fitting out and will soon be ready to sail.

For the young American of means, who has sporting blood in his veins and longs to try a new and novel form of hunting, there is a great chance now to engage in one of the oldest forms of big game hunting known, and in a field which

has not been fittingly exploited by the amateur. To the man who has exhausted even the delight of the sixty-mile-an-hour automobile, there is an unlimited field. The chances are if he once gets an opportunity to taste the unbridled and terrific pleasure of a "Nantucket sleigh ride," he will view his auto-machine as a tame thing ever afterward. The Nantucket sleigh ride is so common an experience with whalers that they are prone to speak of it in disappointing, matter-of-fact language. But, for all that, there isn't an old whaler of them all whose nostrils will not dilate with zest when he thinks upon it, and the landsman who ever has had the rare fortune to experience one is not likely to find anything else in all the rest of his life that will not seem tame compared with it. Few landsmen ever have the opportunity. When a whale-boat lowers to fight a sixty-foot whale, the business is too important to encumber the craft with unskilled passengers. And not many landsmen would really care to go, even if they could, when they behold, wallowing in the sea, the huge thing that is to be attacked.

The ride begins after the whale has been harpooned, and when the boat-header considers it time to draw up alongside and begin lancing. The first thing that is done is to haul in upon the harpoon line until the boat is brought as close to the running whale as is consistent with the extremely delicate margin that the whaler allows for safety. "Safety" to the whaler really means to remain just about an inch or two beyond the reach of the vast fluke with which the big beast is beating the sea. Having hauled as far up on the whale as possible, the boat

header reaches over the bows and lifts the line out of the chocks. Swiftly he brings it around outside of the boat and passes it to the bow oarsman, who has faced around on his thwart so that he looks forward. He at once lays back on the line and holds fast with all his might. And immediately the boat, dragged like a railroad car by that mighty living locomotive, begins to run parallel with the side of the whale and just a few feet away from him, being prevented from running right on top of him by the oblique strain of the line.

Now, if the harpoon is well forward in the whale, the boat hangs in a precarious but sufficient are of safety, for the swinging tail hammers the ocean behind it and the wildly sweeping jaw unavailingly searches the sea in front. The boatheader braces himself in the bows until he is based firmly as the stempost, and begins to poise his long, keen, razor-edged, killing lance, waiting for his opportunity to thrust it into the whale's life. Sometimes the opportunity comes within a minute after hauling up on the big "fish." Sometimes it does not come until the boat has been towed for many miles. It does not require very much time to tow a mile when a sixty-foot whale is doing the towing.

As long as the whale runs in a fairly straight course, the boat will hang to him all right. He may champ and bite and hammer the ocean into acres of froth with head and flukes and tail and never shake it off. His only chance for retaliation is to run deep or to "mill." "Milling" is the act of turning suddenly and so bringing the boat within reach of flukes or jaws.