HUNTING OF WHALES 115 



years 1835-1872 about 292,714 whales must have 

 been either captured or destroyed ! 



To write an adequate account of the whaling 

 industry would need a volume to itself. We can only 

 give a few facts. There is no doubt that here as in 

 other countries the pursuit of whales has fallen off 

 enormously in the last fifty years. This is to be 

 partly explained by the increasing rarity of the more 

 valuable kinds, and partly to the replacement of the 

 substances for which whales are hunted by cheaper 

 substitutes. Captain Yule, harbour-master of the 

 port of Dundee, has been good enough to give me 

 some valuable information with regard to the state 



O 



of the whaling industry at that town for incorporation 

 into the present volume. Writing to me in June, 

 1898, Mr. Yule stated that in that year the whaling 

 vessels equipped at Dundee had met with but scant 

 success ; this fact, " coupled with the great fall in the 

 price of oil, and the enormous expense of the voyage, 

 has reduced the industry to such a point that only 

 five vessels have left this season." The followine 



o 



table (also kindly supplied to me by Captain Yule) 

 shows the number of ships and the number of whales 

 caught in a series of years commencing with 1859. 

 The decrease of both sets of figures is most note- 

 worthy. Moreover, the heaviest decrease is in the 

 number of whales. Whereas in 1861 ei^ht vessels 



O 



captured between them 121 whales, the same number 

 of ships in 1897 on ly secured nine whales. This 

 tells its own story. For some further details of whale 

 fisheries the reader is referred to the sections dealing 



