[Illustration:  “ROT AT MOLDERING WHARVES”]

With the extension of the fishing-grounds to the Pacific began the really great days of the whale fishery.  Then, from such a port as Nantucket or New Bedford a vessel would set out, to be gone three years, carrying with her the dearest hopes and ambitions of all the inhabitants.  Perhaps there would be no house without some special interest in her cruise.  Tradesmen of a dozen sorts supplied stores on shares.  Ambitious boys of the best families sought places before the mast, for there was then no higher goal for youthful ambition than command of a whaler.  Not infrequently a captain would go direct from the marriage altar to his ship, taking a young bride off on a honeymoon of three years at sea.  Of course the home conditions created by this almost universal masculine employment were curious.  The whaling towns were populated by women, children, and old men.  The talk of the street was of big catches and the prices of oil and bone.  The conversation in the shaded parlors, where sea-shells, coral, and the trophies of Pacific cruises were the chief ornaments, was of the distant husbands and sons, the perils they braved, and when they might be expected home.  The solid, square houses the whalemen built, stoutly timbered as though themselves ships, faced the ocean, and bore on their ridge-pole a railed platform called the bridge, whence the watchers could look far out to sea, scanning the horizon for the expected ship.  Lucky were they if she came into the harbor without half-masted flag or other sign of disaster.  The profits of the calling in its best days were great.  The best New London record is that of the “Pioneer,” made in an eighteen-months’ cruise in 1864-5.  She brought back 1391 barrels of oil and 22,650 pounds of bone, all valued at $150,060.  The “Envoy,” of New Bedford, after being condemned as unseaworthy, was fitted out in 1847 at a cost of $8000, and sent out on a final cruise.  She found oil and bone to the value of $132,450; and reaching San Francisco in the flush times, was sold for $6000.  As an offset to these records, is the legend of the Nantucket captain who appeared off the harbor’s mouth after a cruise of three years.  “What luck, cap’n?” asked the first to board.  “Well, I got nary a barrel of oil and nary a pound of bone; but I had a mighty good sail.”

When the bar was crossed and the ship fairly in blue water, work began.  Rudyard Kipling has a characteristic story, “How the Ship Found Herself,” telling how each bolt and plate, each nut, screw-thread, brace, and rivet in one of those iron tanks we now call ships adjusts itself to its work on the first voyage.  On the whaler the crew had to find itself, to readjust its relations, come to know its constituent parts, and learn the ways of its superiors.  Sometimes a ship was manned by men who had grown up together and who had served often on the same craft; but as a rule the men of the forecastle were a rough and