14
Historic Nantucket
correspondence on homeward bound vessels. Sailors even nailed a box to a tree on the Galapagos Islands where they could place letters for home or perhaps find one brought for them by another whaler. Such was the way news travelled, when it did at all. As the sale of whale oil brought a slow return of prosperity for Nantucketers, the Napoleonic Wars overwhelmed the European continent and soon involved all trading nations. Because the restrictive British Orders in Council and Napoleonic Imperial Decrees impeded trade by European countries, the growing commerce of the United States prospered. It grew, in fact, so rapidly between 1789 and 1810 that shipbuilding became a major industry. About 4,200 additional seamen were needed to man the new ships, and the consequent labor shortage in America inflated seamen's wages from $8.00 to $24.00 a month. This encouraged hundreds of foreigners, mostly British, to jump vessels and become naturalized citizens in order to get higher pay. The British Navy, in its struggle to the death with Napoleon, responded to this manpower drain by impressing seamen, a policy which President Madison gave as his reason for declaring war on Great Britain in 1812. New England resisted passionately the idea of a second conflict with the British. Our islanders remembered keenly the suffering of the previous war. At this time, however, the seat of national power resided in the South; and when Thomas Jefferson's government passed the Embargo Act of 1807, prohibiting American ships from sailing to foreign ports, many New Englanders saw this as his attempt to destroy Northern wealth and power. Although President Jefferson rescinded the Act three days before leaving office in 1809, our foreign trade dropped to one-third its pre-embargo level. With Louisiana about to become a state, thereby increasing the Southern power base, many saw a developing crisis in the balance of power between the agricultural South and the commercially developing North. Seeds of the civil conflict to come forty years later were already sewn at this time. Against this political background Nantucket whalers were sailing the South Pacific in support of the town's chief commercial interest, the sale of sperm oil. Whaling ships customarily interrupted their sea voyages to obtain fresh water, wood for fuel, or - if the stop was the Galapagos Islands - perhaps a giant turtle or two. One such stopping-off point which quickly became a favorite of the whalers
