The whale came to the New Englander long before the New Englanders went after him.  In the earliest colonial days the carcasses of whales were frequently found stranded on the beaches of Cape Cod and Long Island.  Old colonial records are full of the lawsuits growing out of these pieces of treasure-trove, the finder, the owner of the land where the gigantic carrion lay stranded, and the colony all claiming ownership, or at least shares.  By 1650 all the northern colonies had begun to pursue the business of shore whaling to some extent.  Crews were organized, boats kept in readiness on the beach, and whenever a whale was sighted they would put off with harpoons and lances after the huge game, which, when slain, would be towed ashore, and there cut up and tried out, to the accompaniment of a prodigious clacking of gulls and a widely diffused bad smell.  This method of whaling is still followed at Amagansett and Southampton, on the shore of Long Island, though the growing scarcity of whales makes catches infrequent.  In the colonial days, however, it was a source of profit assiduously cultivated by coastwise communities, and both on Long Island and Cape Cod citizens were officially enjoined to watch for whales off shore.  Whales were then seen daily in New York harbor, and in 1669 one Samuel Maverick recorded in a letter that thirteen whales had been taken along the south shore during the winter, and twenty in the spring.

Little by little the boat voyages after the leviathans extended further into the sea as the industry grew and the game became scarce and shy.  The people of Cape Cod were the first to begin the fishery, and earliest perfected the art of “saving” the whale—­that is, of securing all of value in the carcass.  But the people of the little island of Nantucket brought the industry to its highest development, and spread most widely the fame of the American whaleman.  Indeed, a Nantucket whaler laden with oil was the first vessel flying the Stars and Stripes that entered a British port.  It is of a sailor on this craft that a patriotic anecdote, now almost classic, is told.  He was unhappily deformed, and while passing along a Liverpool street was greeted by a British tar with a blow on his “humpback” and the salutation:  “Hello, Jack!  What you got there?” “Bunker Hill, d——­n ye!” responded the Yankee.  “Think you can climb it?” Far out at sea, swept ever by the Atlantic gales, a mere sand-bank, with scant surface soil to support vegetation, this island soon proved to its settlers its unfitness 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