When it languished their fortunes sunk, never to rise to their earlier heights, though cotton-spinning came to occupy the attention of the people of New Bedford, while Nantucket found a placid prosperity in entertaining summer boarders.

And even during the years when whales were plentiful, and their oil still in good demand, there came periods of interruption to the trade and poverty to its followers.

The Revolution first closed the seas to American ships for seven long years, and at its close the whalers found their best market--England--still shut against them.

Moreover, the high seas during the closing years of the eighteenth and the opening of the nineteenth centuries were not as to-day, when a pirate is as scarce a beast of prey as a highwayman on Hounslow Heath.

The Napoleonic wars had broken down men's natural sense of order and of right, and the seas swarmed with privateers, who on occasion were ready enough to turn pirates.