FISHERY BULLETIN: VOL. 85, NO, 3 



Table 7, — Numbers of whalebone whales landed by U,S, whalers, 1805-1914. as calculated from 



the catch per voyage. 



but other problems (allowance for sealing voy- 

 ages, correct allocation of incomplete voyages) 

 may not have been adequately solved. Further- 

 more, even the stratification by voyage-type may 

 have been insufficient to correctly portray the 

 species composition of the total fleet; an alterna- 

 tive procedure might be to stratify by home port, 

 but this would probably involve too fine a stratifi- 

 cation for the size of the sample available. 



A further problem identified with the 

 Townsend sample is that there may be occasional 

 misidentification or omission of catches (see 

 Bockstoce and Botkin 1983). There is no indica- 

 tion of the extent of this problem (which would 

 require checking Townsend's tabulations against 

 the original journals), but it means that the accu- 

 racy of the extrapolations made in this paper may 

 be adversely affected to an unknown degree. 



Some independent estimates of the landed 

 catch of various stocks have been made. Hender- 

 son ( 1972) estimated that 4,958-5,058 Californian 

 gray whales were taken by pelagic whalers be- 

 tween 1846 and 1874, whereas calculations from 

 the Townsend sample are that 2,665 to 3,013 gray 

 whales were taken over the period 1850 to 1879, 

 Henderson's estimate, however, includes the 

 catches of non-U. S. vessels. From data in Hender- 

 son's table II it can be calculated that 64.9Vf of the 

 21,135 barrels of oil from Scammon's Lagoon be- 

 tween 1858 and 1873 were taken by U.S.- 



registered vessels. If this proportion is applied to 

 the total catch, it means that U,S, pelagic whalers 

 may have accounted for a landed catch of 3,218 to 

 3,283 gray whales. On this basis, calculations 

 from the Townsend sample may be about 6 to 19% 

 too low. 



Bockstoce and Botkin (1983) calculated that 

 16,600 bowhead whales were taken from the 

 Western Arctic population by the pelagic whaling 

 industry between 1849 and 1914; this apparently 

 included catches by non-U. S. vessels. Henderson 

 has also estimated that the total catch of bowhead 

 whales from the Okhotsk Sea stock between 1847 

 and 1867 was about 15,200 animals, with another 

 92 known to have been taken between 1867 and 

 1896 (Kugler 1984). About 90% of the voyages to 

 the Okhotsk Sea between 1847 and 1867 were 

 made by American whaleships, which if consid- 

 ered applicable to the catch would mean that they 

 took about 13,760 bowhead whales from 1847 to 

 1896, Ross ( 1979) has estimated the catch of bow- 

 head whales by American whalers in the Davis 

 Strait from 1847 to 1891 as 413, and that in Hud- 

 son Bay from 1860 to 1912 as 532 animals; his 

 figure for the Beaufort Sea of 794 bowhead 

 whales between 1889 and 1908 is assumed to be 

 included in Bockstoce and Botkin's calculations 

 for the entire Western Arctic. Combining the data 

 from Ross (1979), Bockstoce and Botkin (1983), 

 and Kugler (1984) indicates a total bowhead 



416 



