Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,
which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies
of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with
their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals,
where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch;
in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished,
to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.
But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short
a period ago--not a good lifetime--the census of the buffalo in Illinois
exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present
day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region;
and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear
of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily
forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one
ship hunting the Sperm Whales for forty-eight months think they
have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home
the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian
and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when the far west
(in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and a virgin,
the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of months,
mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain
not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that,
if need were, could be statistically stated.
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