From hunting the whale offshore in small boats, Cape seamen, when the prey grew more wary, pursued it to the farthest reaches of the ocean, and brought back prosperity to the home ports. Wellfleet was a great whaling town; Truro also, and Provincetown. Then the bulk of the business went to the islands to the southward and to New Bedford. Captain Jesse Holbrook of Truro, who killed fifty-four sperm whales on one voyage, was employed for twelve years by a London company to teach English lads his art, and it was two Truro captains, on the advice of an English admiral stationed at Boston, who were the first to go whaling about the Falkland Islands. Captain William Handy, of Sandwich, was another famous whaling-captain during and after the Revolution, sailing from New Bedford and also from Dunkirk by some engagement made with Napoleon. On one such voyage he and a single companion, both unarmed, had a desperate encounter with a huge polar bear where they had landed on an icy shore; the ice bore up them and not the bear, or even their courage would have availed them little in the unequal conflict. Captain Handy retired to become a shipbuilder, but was impoverished by “the French spoliations,” as well as from the War of 1812, and at the age of sixty returned to the sea to make good his fortune and “to show the boys how to take whales,” when “he accomplished in fifteen months a most successful cruise to the admiration of all.” In 1771 no less than seventy-four vessels had been engaged in such ventures; and Mr. Osborn, the versatile Eastham parson who taught his people how to use peat, celebrated their prowess on the sea in a whaling-song that opened with appropriate detail: “When Spring returns with western gales, And gentle breezes sweep The ruffling seas, we spread our sails To plow the wat’ry deep; For killing northern whale prepar’d. Our nimble boats on board With craft and rum (our chief regard) And good provision stor’d; Cape Cod, our dearest, native land, We leave astern, and lose Its sinking cliffs and lessening sands Whilst Zephyr gently blows.” But it is Edmund Burke, in the British Commons, with the _magno modo_ of the time but commendable accuracy, who pronounced the panegyric of the New England whalers: “While we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, penetrating into the deepest recesses of Hudson Bay; while 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. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of natural ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry. While some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude and pursue the gigantic game along the shores of Brazil.” CHAPTER VII