whale fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the Arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of Polar cold—that they are at the Antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the South. … No ocean but what is vexed with their fisheries, no climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dextrous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried their perilous mode of hardy enterprise to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people—a people who are still, as it were, in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood."[1]
The war of the Revolution, from which Burke would have gladly saved them, and which suspended their activity in that direction, did not turn the New Englanders from their chosen avocation. Within two months after the preliminary treaty of peace was signed and before the permanent treaty had been agreed upon, a London newspaper of the period announced: "On the third of February, 1783, the ship Bedford, Captain Moores, belonging to Massachusetts, arrived in the Downs. She was not allowed regular entry until after some consultation between the commissioners of customs and the Lords of the Council, on account of the many acts of Parliament yet in force against the rebels of America. She was loaded with 587 barrels of whale oil and manned
- ↑ 2 Works of Edmund Burke, Boston, 1866, p. 117.
