While Nantucket has long enjoyed an illustrious position in America's whaling history, Cape Cod's contribution to the industry is relatively unknown. Yet, it was a Cape Codder who taught the Nantucketers how to hunt whales. In Cape Cod Shore Whaling, authors Duncan Oliver and John Braginton-Smith uncover Cape Cod's integral role in shaping whalefishery, which began along the Cape's sandy shores and evolved into the far-flung whaling expeditions that drove Nantucket's economy into the nineteenth century. Drawing on rare documents never before published, whaling journals, and diaries, Oliver and Braginton-Smith recreate a bygone age when men fought one another for rights to the sea.

American whaling began in Delaware Bay not in Cape Cod, as is commonly believed. The whale fishery began as a Dutch whaling colony at Lewes, Delaware in 1631. Whaling on the north shore of the bay began at Cape May by whalers from Long Island in the 1680s and 1690s. Whaling proved to be a valuable asset to the colonial economy of West Jersey; the whaling trade built elite family dynasties on the Jersey Cape that lasted for generations. As these families prospered, through the sale of whale oil, blubber and baleen to Philadelphia and beyond, they succeeded, unlike their fellow colonists in Southern slave societies, in producing a vibrant, diverse economy. They engaged in everything from oyster to sturgeon fishing, cedar mining to cattle raising, shipbuilding to knitting mittens. Not only did the whaler yeomen flourish, many were able to increase their land holdings, establish plantations, purchase slaves and endow their families with great wealth. Most importantly, the people of Cape May participated fully in the colonial economy, trading with merchants not only in Philadelphia, but throughout the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies, New England, the West Indies and Europe.

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