FISHERY BULLETIN: VOL, 85. NO. 3 



San Diego did not appear until gray whaling was in 

 decline and the price of right and bowhead whalebone 

 had risen considerably after the mid 1860s. 



Rather than adopting an arbitrary value for the 

 average whalebone yield of gray whales, it has 

 been taken as zero. This means that estimates of 

 the size of the catch of other species using whale- 

 bone production may be correspondingly overesti- 

 mated by an unknown but probably small 

 amount. However, as whalebone production is 

 used only to estimate the landed catch from 1880 

 onwards (see below), and there are no gray 

 whales in the logbook sample after this date, the 

 practical effect of this assumption is minimal. 



Estimates of Total Landed Catch 

 of Whalebone Whales 



Figures for the importation of whale products 

 into the United States have been based on table J 

 of Starbuck (1878), supplemented by data in 

 Hegarty (1959). As pointed out by Starbuck, it 

 would appear from a comparison of imports and 

 exports from 1804 to 1817 that much oil and bone 

 must have been imported which was not credited 

 to any port, and thus did not appear in table J. 

 After 1817 exports as listed by Starbuck totalled 

 0.373 of imports for whale oil and 0.697 for whale- 

 bone. It was presumably these figures that led 

 Starbuck (1878) to propose that exportation of 

 whale oil and bone for 1804 to 1817 represented 

 one-third and two-thirds respectively of the im- 

 portation, and I have followed his proposal in ad- 

 justing the figures for 1804 to 1817 upwards on a 

 prorata basis. The validity of this assumption is of 

 course unknown. 



Inspection of table K in Starbuck (1878) also 

 shows that importation figures for whalebone 

 from 1838 to 1842 were "estimated" or "as- 

 sumed", apparently at a rate of 10 lb of whalebone 

 per barrel of oil, and may not therefore be very 

 reliable. The data, summed by five yearly periods, 

 are shown in Table 2. 



In order to estimate the total landed catch for 

 any 5-yr period, the catch of each species given in 

 Table 1 has been multiplied by its mean yield of 

 oil or whalebone (corrected for the relevant year 

 of catch, if necessary, using the median year in 

 any 5-yr period) and the resulting production fig- 

 ures summed. Comparison of this total with that 

 in Table 2 for the same period then provides a 

 scaling factor by which the catches in Table 1 

 have to be multiplied to obtain the total landed 



catch for that period. These scaling factors are 

 shown in Table 2. 



In two of the three data sets (those for oil and 

 whalebone factor A), there was a tendency for the 

 scaling factors to be particularly high at the be- 

 ginning of the time series, indicating that logbook 

 coverage (and hence the reliability of extrapola- 

 tions) was poor in the earlier years. The great 

 differences between the two scaling factors for 

 whalebone before about 1845 suggests either that 

 a lot of whalebone was not being collected from 

 the whales taken, or that it was not possible to 

 allocate imports of it to a particular port or vessel 

 (Starbuck 1878). The low ratio of whalebone to 

 whale oil imported from 1805 to 1834 (Table 2) 

 would indicate that the former was the more 

 likely. Given the unreliability of import figures 

 for whalebone from 1804 to 1817 and between 

 1838 and 1842, this suggests that oil production 

 figures would be a more appropriate measure of 

 the landed catch before about 1845. 



All three factors converge closely from 1855 to 

 1879, presumably indicating that full utilization 

 was being made of both whalebone and whale oil. 

 During this period the ratio of whalebone to 

 whale oil imported ranged from 7.7 to 11.0, with 

 a mean of 9.1 lb to a barrel of oil (Table 2). 



After 1880 the factors tend to diverge again, 

 but this time the divergence is mainly between 



Table 2. — Five-year compilation of imports of whalebone and 

 wtiale oil into the United States (from Starbuck 1878 and Hegarty 

 1959). 



1 Rounded to one decimal place. 



412 



