corporation in marble of the ideal of Oliver Twist; and the palm. was conferred on Powers for his immortal statue of the Greek Slave. When these successes had turned away the tide of derision from our country, the yacht America entered the Thames. Skillful architects saw that she combined, in before unknown proportions, the elements of grace and motion, and her modest cha!lenge was reluctantly accepted, and even then only for a tenth part of the prize she proposed. The trial was graced by the presence of the Queen and her Court, and watched with an interest created by national pride and ambition, and yet the triumph was complete.

In the very hour of this, of itself, conclusive demonstration of American superiority in utilitarian inventions, and in the art "that leads to nautical dominion," a further and irresistible confirmation was given by the arrival of American clippers from India, freighted at advanced rates with shipments, consigned by the agents of the East India Company at Calcutta to their own warehouses in London. Such and so recent are the proofs, that in the capital element of invention we are equal to the contest for the supremacy of the seas. When I consider them, and consider our resources, of which those of Pennsylvania, or of the valley of the Mississippi, or of California, alone exceed the entire native wealth of Great Britain; when I consider, moreover, our yet unelicited manufacturing capacity-our great population, already nearly equal to that of the British Islands, and multiplying at a rate unknown in human progress by accessions from both of the old continents; when I consider the advantages of our geographical position, midway between them; and when I consider, above all, the expanding and elevating influence of freedom upon the genius of our people, I feel quite assured that their enterprise will be adequate to the glorious conflict, if it shall be only sustained by constancy and perseverance on the part of their government. I do not know that we shall prevail in that conflict; but for myself, like the modest hero who was instructed to charge on the artillery at Niagara, I can say that we "will try ;" and that when a difficulty occurs no greater than that which meets us now, my motto shall be the words of the dying commander of the Chesapeake "Don't give up the ship."

SURVEY OF THE ARCTIC AND PACIFIC OCEANS.

JULY 29, 1852.

Mr. PRESIDENT: Some years ago, when ascending the Alabama, I saw a stag plunge into the river, and gallantly gain the western bank, while the desponding sportsman whose rifle he had escaped, sat down to mourn his ill luck under the deep magnolia forest that shaded the eastern shore. You, sir, are a dweller in that region, and are, as all the world knows, a gentleman of cultivated taste and liberal fortunes. Perhaps, then, you may have been that unfortunate hunter. Howsoever that may have been, I wish to converse with you now of the chase, and yet not of deer, or hawk, or hound, but of a chase upon the seas; and still not of angling or trolling, nor of the busy toil of those worthy fishermen who seem likely to embroil us, certainly without reluctance on our part, in a controversy about their rights in the Bay of Fundy; but of a nobler sport, and more adventurous sportsmen than Izaak Walton, or Daniel Boone, or even Nimrod, the mightiest as well as most ancient of hunters, ever dreamed of— the chase of the whale over his broad range of the universal

ocean.

Do not hastily pronounce the subject out of order or unprofit able, or unworthy of this high presence. The Phoenicians, the earliest mercantile nation known to us, enriched themselves by selling the celebrated Tyrian dye, and glass made of sand taken from the sea; and they acquired not only those sources of wealth, but the art of navigation itself, in the practice of their humble calling as fishermen. A thousand years ago, King Alfred was laying the foundations of empire for Young England, as we are now doing for Young America. The monarch whom men have justly surnamed the Wise as well as the Great, did not disdain to

listen to Octher, who related the adventures of a voyage along the coast of Norway, "so far north as commonly the whale hunters used to travel;" nor was the stranger suffered to depart until he had submitted to the king "a most just survey and description" of the Northern Seas, not only as they extended upward to the North Cape, but also as they declined downward along the southeast coast of Lapland, and so following the icy beach of Russia to where the river Dwina discharged its waters into the White Sea, or, as it was then called, the Sea of Archangel. Perhaps my poor speech may end in some similar lesson. The incident I have related is the burden of the earliest historical notice of the subjugation of the monster of the seas to the uses of man. The fishery was carried on then, and near six hundred years afterward, by the Basques, Biscayans, and Norwegians, for the food yielded by the tongue, and the oil obtained from the fat of the animal. Whalebone entered into commerce in the fifteenth century, and at first commanded the enormous price of seven hundred pounds sterling per ton, exceeding a value in this age of ten thousand dollars. Those were merry times, if not for science, at least for royalty, when, although the material for stays and hoops was taken from the mouth, the law appropriated the tail of every whale taken by an English subject to the use of the queen, for the supply of the royal wardrobe.

In 1486, the Portuguese reached the Cape of Storms, and, in happy augury of an ultimate passage to India, changed its illomened name to that of "Good Hope;" and immediately thereafter the northern states of Europe, especially England and Holland, began that series of voyages, not even yet ended, in search of a passage to the East through the floating fields and mountains of ice in the Arctic Ocean. The unsuccessful search disclosed the refuge of the whales in the bays and creeks of Spitzbergen. In 1575, a London merchant wrote to a foreign correspondent for advice and direction as to the course of killing the whale, and received instructions how to build and equip a vessel of two hundred tons, and to man it exclusively with experienced whale hunters of Biscay. The attraction of dominion was stronger in that age than the lust of profit. The English now claimed Spitzbergen, and all its surrounding ice and waters, by discovery. The Dutch, with truth, alleged an earlier exploration, while the Danes claimed the whole region as a part of Greenland-a pretension VOL. 1-16.

that could not then be disproved; and all these parties sent armed forces upon the fishing ground, less to protect their few fishermen, than to establish exclusive rights there. After some fifty years, these nations discovered, first, that it was absurd to claim jurisdiction where no permanent possession could ever be estab lished, by reason of the rigors of climate; and secondly, that there were fish enough and room enough for all competitors. Thenceforward, the whale fishery in the Arctic Ocean has been free to all nations.

The Dutch perfected the harpoon, the reel, the line, and the spear, as well as the art of using them. And they established, also, the system which we have since found indispensable, of rewarding all the officers and crews employed in the fishery, not with direct wages or salaries, but with shares in the spoils of the game, proportioned to skill and experience. Combining with these the advantages of favorable position, and of frugality and perseverance quite proverbial, the Dutch even founded a fishing settlement called Smeerenburgh, on the coast of Spitzbergen, within eleven degrees of the North Pole, and they took whales in its vicinity in such abundance that ships were needed to go out ir ballast to carry home the surplus oil and bone above the capacity of the whaling vessels. The whales, thus vigorously attacked again changed their lurking place. Spitzbergen was abandoned by the fishermen, and the very site of Smeerenburgh is now unknown. In the year 1496, Sebastian Cabot, in the spirit of that age, seeking a north-western passage to the Indies, gave to the world the discovery of Prima Vista, or, as we call it, Newfoundland, and the Basques, Biscayans, Dutch and English, immediately thereafter commenced the chase for whales in the waters surrounding it.

Scarcely had the colonists of Massachusetts planted themselves at Plymouth, before the sterility of the soil and the rigor of the climate forced them to resort to the sea to eke out their subsistence. Pursuing the whales out from their own bays, in vessels of only forty tons burden, they appeared on the fishing ground off Newfoundland in the year 1690. Profiting by nearness of position and economy in building and equipping ships, and sharing also in the bounties with which England was then stimulating the whale fishery, they soon excelled all their rivals on the Newfoundland waters, as well as in Baffin's Bay and off the coast of Green

land. Thus encouraged, they ran down the coasts of America and Africa, and in the waters rolling between them they discovered the black whale, a new and inferior species, yet worthy of capture; and then stretching off toward the South Pole, they found still another species, the sperm whale, whose oil is still preferred above all other; and thus they enlarged the whale fishery for the benefit of the world, which since that time has distinguished the two branches of that enterprise geographically by the designation of the Northern and Southern fisheries. In 1775, the fisheries were carried on by the Americans, the English, the Dutch, and the French. The French employed only a small fleet, the Dutch a larger one of 129 sail. The English had only 96 ships, while the Americans had 132 vessels in the Southern fishery, and 177 in the Northern fishery, manned with 4,000 persons, and bringing in oil and whalebone of the value of $1,111,000. This precociousness of American nautical enterprise elicited from Burke, in his great speech for conciliation to the colonies, a tribute familiar to our countrymen, and perhaps the most glowing passage that even that great orator ever wrote or spoke: "Look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery. While we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits, 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 national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equatorial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that while some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No ocean but what is vexed with their fisheries, no climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this perilous mode of hardy enterprise to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people-a people who