But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the clear whale oil for illuminating purposes, the tough and supple whalebone, the spermaceti which filled the great case in the sperm-whale's head, the precious ambergris--prized even among the early Hebrews, and chronicled in the Scriptures as a thing of great price--were prizes, in pursuit of which men braved every terror of the deep, threaded the ice-floes of the Arctic, fought against the currents about Cape Horn, and steered to every corner of the Seven Seas the small, stout brigs and barks of New England make.
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.