Whale Evolution Nightmare
Early northeast colonial settlers, William Bradford and Edward Winslow, in 1620 sent out a business prospectus: “Cape Cod was like to be a place of good fishing, for we saw daily great whales, of the best kind for oil and bone.”
The American whaling industry was just beginning. Two hundred years later, New England was the premier whaling center in the world. More than 10,000 men set sail on whaling ships in 1857 from New Bedford, Massachusetts, alone. Certainly, whale evolution or extinction was not a popular topic.
Within the next 100 years, during the lifetime of Herman Melville’s mythical Moby Dick (illustrated), the whaling industry was forced to hunt deeper into the ocean and eventually into the southern Atlantic, leaving the North Atlantic population decimated.
