In 1635, under pressure from the Church of England for his nonconformity, the Rev. Richard Mather decided it was time to leave England with his wife and sons and start a new life in New England.

The sea crossing took three weeks. At Cape Cod, Mather wrote in his journal that he was already quite used to seeing "multitudes of great whales, which was now grown ordinary and usual to behold . . . spewing up water in the air like the smoke of chimneys and making the sea about them white and hoary."

At the time that Mather traveled to Massachusetts, whales were abundant. Their numbers steadily decreased in the centuries that followed and plummeted in the 20th century. By the 1970s some species, far from making the sea hoary, seemed to have vanished altogether.