The statistics for the voyages of the several Mystic whalers comes from Alexander Starbuck’s History of the American Whale Fishery. In a few cases, dates and given names of masters were taken from the documents described in Table III. Occasionally Starbuck apparently had the wrong master entirely. Where there was any question, we used the name of the master as given on the registration.
The values assigned to the oil and bone were arrived at by multiplying the quantity of the catch given by Starbuck by the average price of each commodity during the year in which a vessel returned. When Starbuck reported that a vessel had sent oil and bone home, they were treated as though they had arrived in the vessel. It should be noted that Starbuck reported the quantity of oil in barrels and that of bone in pounds.