were hungry, and it was the cod and other fish, with lobsters, eels and clams, or oysters brought to them by the Indians, that saved them from starvation. The industry was well recognized in the early regulations and statutes. This was true even while the Old Colony kept its identity, and shortly after the union with Massachusetts, or in 1694, the General Court made laws concerning the mackerel and other fisheries. There was a duty prescribed of twelve pence per barrel, recognizing "the providence of God which hath made Cape Cod commodious to us for fishing with seines:" The proceeds were turned over for the support of a free school at Plymouth.

Barrels of fish in no way measure the importance of fishing in the Old Colony. Lines of worldwide trade began to shoot out from the coasts of Barnstable and Plymouth, and it was fishing that was behind them. This was the large factor in starting the round of commercial exchanges. Cape ships carried the fish to the West Indies, and brought back molasses and spirits, which the Cape wanted and Boston wanted.

Here too, was the sailor's schooling. Seamen by the hundreds, rather by the thousands, got the stern training which enabled them with small change of habit to pour their experi

ence and their daring into the early navies of America.

Whale fishing came in at an early date, along with the mackerel and the cod, and was in like fashion subject to the restrictions of Colonial law. The first voyagers regretfully saw fortunes slip away from them as the whales frolicked in the Bay and their ships were as innocent of harpoons as they were of small boats, and small hooks for the lesser game of the sea. But they atoned for early unpreparedness, and the history of New England whaling in its later thrills and greatness, began in Truro, developed in Wellfleet and then centered in Provincetown. Thence it extended across Nantucket Sound and Buzzards Bay to Nantucket and New Bedford.

It was a public duty in Plymouth, an obligation resting on every citizen, to watch offshore for whales. If a whale was sighted a boat was at once launched to attack. A "whaling ground," or reservation for watching, was set apart on the "North shore," which was in the northwestern part of the present town of Dennis. As time went on this watching did not bring returns, for the whales were leaving the Old Colony shores, made shy, perhaps, and learning through some sort of animal wisdom, that there was greater safety in the

Only two or three

Cape Cod in the

remote and open waters. whales were caught near

year 1746.

Thoreau, like other good travelers, read all he could, before he went. In the scattered literature of the old Cape, the drift whale and the minister's un-whalelike salary had stirred his ready capacity for the ludicrous, and he gives us an indelible portrait of the poor clergyman eagerly scanning the sea from his perch on the shore. The minister was not the only beneficiary of the stranded whale; the school received its part also, for school and church and minister all moved on a high level of privilege and honor in the Old Colony.

The drift whale was not, however, turned over as a pure gift of God to heavenly uses. Towns had their rights, and private finders had theirs, and human nature being about at its average, there was much controversy. Sandwich had its full share of drift-whale regulations before the town was twenty years old, and Old Colony riparian rights in 1654 took account of shore owners on whose strands whales were cast up. The whale killing in general became profitable, and, so early as 1687, two hundred tons of oil were exported to England; "one of our best returnes."

The blackfish is a small whale which runs