During the period before the Civil War the whaling fleet was enjoying what has been called the Golden Era of its prosperity. This fact is all the more interesting because the prosperity was due to the character of the whalemen as developed by their environment. Because Nantucket as farm land could afford no more than a bare living to a small number of people, the more ambitious residents were obliged to look elsewhere for a career; and when they looked they saw right whales just beyond--sometimes in--the surf. A storm--a seeming disaster--was the means of leading the right whalers to go in search of sperm whales, and that cultivated enterprise, because it took them ever farther and farther from home. The spirit of enterprise was also cultivated by the "lay" system of paying the crew. Every man received a share of the oil instead of set wages. The system sharpened the eyes of the lookout, gave strength to the arm of the man at the oars, and cooled the nerves of the man who thrust the lance under the shoulder-blade of the whale. When Captain James Shields reached the Brazil grounds too late in the season, the system of "no oil, no pay" drove him around Cape Horn in search of a new ground. When, in 1818, Captain George W. Gardener found the grounds on the west coast of South America barren, he boldly headed across the unexplored Pacific in search of others--with success. In 1819 a merchantman from China stopped at the Sandwich Islands and told a number of whalemen there that he had seen great schools of whales on the coast of Japan. Thereupon the whalemen raced away for the new grounds. In 1843 two New Bedford captains found fortune on the coast of Kamchatka and another in the Okhotsk sea. Two years later still, Captain Royce, of the Sag Harbor bark _Superior_, entered the Arctic by way of Bering's Strait. The countries of Europe sent naval squadrons at great expense to explore the Seven Seas; the whalemen of America explored the waters of the whole world more thoroughly, if less scientifically, at their own expense, and made money in the quest. One volume of the American State Papers contains a list of more than 400 islands that were discovered by them in the Pacific alone.