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.