BKST LAN'DEn CATCH OF KlClir WMAI.K 



Table 5. — Proportion of mixed voyages by US. whalers 

 landing small consignments of whale oil (but no whale- 

 bone) on which whalebone whales were taken. 



Table 6. — Breakdown of Townsend's (1935) sample into voyage- 

 type, with scaling factors (A1, A2) derived from numbers of such 

 voyages in Starbuck (1878) and Hegarty (1959). 



baleen whales during the same period. This re- 

 sulted in an effective conversion of 812 mixed 

 voyages between 1805 and 1910 to sperm whaling 

 voyages. 



Because Starbuck (1878) and Hegarty (1959) 

 listed voyages by the year of departure, the data 

 in the catch-per-voyage analysis has been com- 

 piled against year of departure rather than (as 

 was done for the production-based analysis) by 

 year of arrival. The numbers of sperm, mixed, and 

 whalebone voyages in Townsend's sample for 

 each 5-yr period are given in Table 6, together 

 with the scaling factors Al and A2 for mixed and 

 whalebone whalers respectively. The latter repre- 

 sent the ratio of the number of voyages of each 

 type in the Townsend sample to the number of 

 similar voyages in Starbuck/Hegarty for that pe- 

 riod, after correction (as described above) for voy- 

 ages believed to be sealing rather than whaling. 

 These scaling factors are then applied to the total 

 numbers of whales landed in the Townsend sam- 

 ple for that period and voyage-type, and the re- 

 sults for each voyage-type added to give the total 

 number of each species for that period. 



This analysis provides an estimate of the 

 landed catch of whalebone whales from American 

 vessels between 1805 and 1914 as 117,308, com- 

 prised of 29,788 bowhead, 70,343 right. 14,164 

 humpback, and 3,013 gray whales (Table 7). Of 

 the right whales. 186 iO.S'/i) were taken in the 

 North Atlantic, 14,480 (20.6'h in the North 

 Pacific. 28.532 (40.6Vf) in the South Atlantic, 

 14,652 (20.8Vr) in the South Pacific, and 12,493 

 ilLS'/c) in the Indian Ocean. 



DISCUSSION 



The two methods used give somewhat similar 



results, estimates of the landed catch differing by 

 <10'^ in all cases except for South Atlantic right 

 whales and humpback whales (where the 

 production-based estimates exceeded the catch 

 per voyage estimates by 13 and 297^ respectively) 

 and gray whales (where the catch per voyage esti- 

 mate exceeded the production estimate by 13%). 



Nevertheless, both sets of estimates are essen- 

 tially derived from the same basic data 

 (Townsend's sample), and a more fundamental 

 problem with both analyses is how representative 

 this sample was of the contemporary Yankee fish- 

 ery. The 1,651 voyages examined by Townsend 

 are equivalent to only 129^^ of the estimated total 

 number of voyages made by American pelagic 

 whalers (Sherman 1965), but the scaling factors 

 in Tables 2 and 6 indicate that the coverage of 

 voyages in some periods (particularly prior to 

 1830) was much less than this. Unless the log- 

 book sample is truly random with respect to the 

 species and numbers of whales taken, any simple 

 reconstruction of the total catch therefrom is 

 likely to be inaccurate. 



The catch per voyage analysis included some 

 stratification of the Townsend sample, so that ex- 

 trapolations to the total fleet might be more rep- 

 resentative. To this extent, therefore, the catch 

 per voyage method might seem the more reliable, 



415 



