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.