A harbor became prominent as I picked out the outlines of ships, houses, and even more evidence of cultivation. I wondered again curiously for the hundredth time as to why the whales had left us and hadn't escorted us into port.
It took us over an hour for the details to start standing out to us and when they did it became apparent that we had been noticed as well. The ships in the harbor were what one could expect of the great sailing era of the seventeen hundreds and a little later.
I saw no ironclad battleships among the moored vessels. There had been several to make the voyage with the Southern fleet, but in retrospection I reasoned that they had probably rusted out long since. Even the wooden ships at anchor looked of a more recent construction than a hold over remnant from the Civil War era.
It had been roughly 150 years since these people had come here, but technology had seemed to stand still and didn't appear to have progressed any. That was strange I thought to myself. Had all of Atlantis's vast technology been destroyed along with everything else in the great flood?
It would seem so, at least, from outward appearances. I had half expected to have alien looking gunships hovering in the air all around us as we were threatened with being blown apart by death rays.
While I was glad that wasn't the case I was surprised. Had these plantation owners really just been growing crops all this time?
They didn't even have a market to sell produce to!
Or did they?
There were a lot of questions to be answered.
I could see people lining the docks in the distance. As we got closer I saw something in the water beside one of the ships at anchor. It was a whale and it was dead.
There were people up and down the length of the whale cutting it up and harvesting the carcass for meat and blubber. I looked around at the other ships at anchor. Each ship had a figurehead ornament of a whale tusk mounted to its prow.
I wasn't opposed to the practice of whaling, but there seemed something off with this setup. All these ships were whaling ships. What need could there be for so many whaling vessels?
Why kill whales who appeared to not have it out for humans, but instead protected them?
I was starting to get uneasy about my decision to make a bold approach into the harbor. Maybe we should have just tried to slip ashore unnoticed somewhere and test the waters first.