THE HISTORY OF DUTCH SEA FISHERIES. 131 



chief partners, and dissimulated in such a manner as not to 

 let the others have any share in them ; and most of the 

 ships now engaged in whaling are kept afloat merely because 

 a majority of votes in the partnership are in this manner 

 interested against their being sold or broken up, although 

 the returns of the whaling business proper are generally 

 very unfavourable. Lubertus' indiscreet statements were 

 indeed contradicted by other correspondents ; but the 

 fact that much irregular business was done at the time by 

 Dutch whalers is not positively denied by any of them. 

 Some of these writers, who have all made a secret of their 

 names, account for the continuation of the trade, in despite 

 of unfavourable results, by the fact that the whaling vessels' 

 purveyors were at the time generally part-owners, and 

 recovered on the price of the stores what was lost on the 

 business itself. And this state of things they approve, 

 in virtue of a course of reasoning strongly and curiously 

 illustrative of the economical notions of the period. The 

 money lost on the voyage's balance, says an apologist of 

 the trade in 1773, goes to the ship's victuallers, com- 

 mander, and crew ; it remains in the country, and therefore 

 is not lost to the nation ; and the value of every whale 

 caught, however small their number, is to be accounted 

 as a clear profit, though the sums made by the trade do 

 not cover the expense ! 



If the above controversy sets one point beyond doubt, it 

 is the fact that towards the end of the eighteenth century 

 there was a rottenness in Dutch whaling. Its rapid 

 decrease in the same period, shown by Appendix B, proves 

 that even illegal proceedings could not cover losses as a 

 rule ; and the demonstration is wound up by the fact that 

 in 1775 the Commissioners of the Greenland and Davis 

 Straits fisheries applied for a bounty, and were not behind- 



