Other nations took up whaling and soon the English and Dutch had large fleets of ships manned by Basque whalers. These ships were based in Greenland and Spitzenberg. The irregular coastlines of these wind-swept lands provided many harbors in which shore whaling stations could be situated. The camps were well constructed, and daily during the arctic summer, the ships put out for whales in waters which were rough, cluttered with icebergs, and shrouded in fog. Naturally, under such difficult conditions, there was great loss of ships and men. The companies were not friendly with one another and periodically raided the shore camps of each other, stealing and burning supplies and buildings. Under normal circumstances such activities would have been provocative of war. However, since communications were poor and the countries concerned were preoccupied with colonizing America, the situation took care of itself, for in time the whales diminished and the whaling companies failed. [Illustration: Cutting-in, from the book _Nimrod of the Sea or The American Whaleman_ by Wm. M. Davis. _Courtesy San Francisco Maritime Museum Association._] Soon after this the colonists in America wrote to relatives in Europe about the richness of the country, not the least of its resources being the whales which spouted just off shore along the entire Eastern seaboard. Whaling companies were formed and these were concentrated along the New England coast. After the separation of the colonies from England, whaling developed locally with the ships which had been engaged in commerce between the colonies and the mother country. It did not take long to exhaust the populations of whales, so the Whalers began to range afar. This led to the discovery of the haunts of the sperm whale in the open oceans of the tropics and subtropics. Yankee ingenuity developed a new kind of whaling in which the whales were brought alongside the base ship for processing. It took a great deal of skill to strip the blanket of fat from a whale which was three-fourths submerged and pitching and rolling on the restless surface. The blubber once removed, was hauled aboard and cooked in kettles to free the oil which was then placed in barrels and stowed below. This form of whaling was called pelagic whaling. It was not uncommon for ships to be away from home port for a year or two before the casks were full. This whaling was dominated by the Americans, and it contributed much to the prosperity of New England, providing much of the capital which later financed its manufacturing developments. This was the golden era of whaling so superbly described by Herman Melville in _Moby Dick_. Here is a real yarn about whaling written by a Whaler who later became a superb author.