ii2 A BOOK OF- WHALES 



t 



of Commerce], or, as Hakluyt thinks, about 890, ' our 

 excellent King Alfred ' received from one Ochther, a 

 Norwegian, an account of his discoveries northward 



O * 



on the coast of Norway; a coast which appears to 

 have been before very little, if at all, known to the 

 Ano-lo-Saxons. There is one very remarkable tiling 



o * 



in this account ; for he tells King Alfred ' that he 

 sailed along the Norway coast, so far north as 

 commonly the whale hunters used to travel,' which 

 shows the great antiquity of whale fishing, though 

 undoubtedly then and long after the use of what 

 is usually called whalebone was not known ; so that 

 they fished for whales merely on account of their 

 fat or oil." 



This story seems to show not merely a great 

 antiquity for the pursuit of whales, but that the 

 fishery was carried on from the shore. No doubt 

 as soon as the value of stranded whales was 

 ascertained they would be hunted in this fashion, and 

 then as the shore-coming whales got scarcer they 

 would be pursued by the whalers further and further 

 into the ocean.* Anyhow, whatever may be the 

 actual date of the first practising of whaling as an 

 industry, it is clear that it was known in this country 

 as early as before the year 1000, for there is an 



* The shore fishery, however, has been up to recent times and is still 

 largely pursued in various quarters of the globe. In New Zealand the 

 Hon. W. Pember Reeves (The Long White Cloud, 1898) informs us this 

 industry commenced in the last decade of the eighteenth century. In 

 the "forties" it became important, and in 1843 there were more than 

 thirty shore stations, employing 500 men. The value of oil and whale- 

 bone of that year was ,50,000. 



