from an English paper of that period,) " the ship Bedford^ Captain Moores, belonging to Massachusetts, arrived in the Downs. She passed Gravesend .on the 4th, and on the 6th was reported at the custom-house in London. She was not allowed regular entry until after some consultation between the commissioners of customs and the Lords of the Council, on account of the many acts of Parliament yet in force against the rebels of America. She was loaded with 587 barrels of whale oil, and manned wholly with American seamen, and belonged to the island of Nan.tucket. The vessel lay at the Horsley-Downs, a little below the Tower, and was the first which displayed the thirteen stripes of America in any British port."
Nevertheless, the lost vantage ground was not easily nor speedily regained. The effort was made without protection, against exclusion in foreign markets, and against bounties by the English Government equivalent to forty dollars per man employed, or sixty per cent., on the value of every cargo obtained—bounties not occasionally nor irregularly offered, but continued from 1750 to 1824, and amounting in. the aggregate to three millions- of pounds sterling. Nor was this all. These bounties, enhanced with additional inducements, were offered to the Nantucket fishermen, on condition- of their abandoning their country and becoming inhabitants of the adjacent British Colonies, or of the British Islands. It seemed, indeed, that a crisis in this great national interest had come.. Happily there was, on the French side of the Channel, at least, one unwearied friend of America, as there were many watchful enemies of England. Lafayette wrote several letters to Boston, and arrested an immigration from Nantucket to the British Colonies and Islands already on the eve of embarkation, and then addressed himself to the French monarch and his Court. France saw at once the dangers of a transfer of so great a number of seamen, together with the very secret, art and mystery of whale hunting, to her hereditary and relentless enemy. The good but ill-fated Louis XVI equipped six whaling vessels, with American harpooners, on his own account, and offered a bounty of nine dollars per man, payable by the Royal Treasury, to every American fisherman who should emigrate to France. In a whole year, only nine families, containing thirty-three persons, accepted this offer; and therefore the-King, in compliance with Lafayette's first advice, adopted the expedient of discriminating in favor of American cargoea of oil and whalebone in the French market. The American whale fishery began to revive, and in 1787, 1788, and 1789, it employed an average of 122 vessels. But it still labored under the pressure of competition, stimulated by bounties both in England and in France. In 1790, the Great and General Council of Massachusetts appealed to Congress for protection to this great interest of that Commonwealth. Mr. Jefferson, the Secretary of State, submitted an elaborate reply, which, while it was liberal in its spirit, nevertheless closed with the declaration, that " the whale1 fishery was a branch of industry so poor as to come to nothing with distant nations who did not support it from their treasuries—that our position placed our fishing on ground somewhat higher, such as to relieve the National Treasury from giving it support, but not to permit it to derive support from the fishery, nor to relieve the Government from the obligation to provide free markets for the. productions of the fishery, if possible."                     *