3. Their seamen are content with lower wages: and, 4. Their
merchants, with a lower profit on their capital. Under all these
favorable circumstances, however, this branch of business, after long
languishing, is at length nearly extinct with them. It is said, they did
not send above half a dozen ships in pursuit of the whale this present
year. The _Nantuckois_, then, were the only people who exercised
this fishery to any extent at the commencement of the late war. Their
country, from its barrenness yielding no subsistence, they were obliged
to seek it in the sea which surrounded them. Their economy was more
rigorous than that of the Dutch. Their seamen, instead of wages, had a
share in what was taken: this induced them to fish with fewer hands,
so that each had a greater dividend in the profit; it made them more
vigilant in seeking game, bolder in pursuing it, and parsimonious in all
their expenses. London was their only market. When, therefore, by
the late revolution, they became aliens in Great Britain, they became
subject to the alien duty of eighteen pounds five shillings the ton of
oil, which being more than equal to the price of the common whale-oil,
they are obliged to abandon that fishery.
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