THE PRESENT SURVIVAL OF OPEN BOAT WHALING 3°5 



Table 4 summarizes the condition, in stations and material, of Azores Sperm whaling at the time 

 of my survey in 1949. The eight islands with whaleries maintain in all twenty-one stations and, dis- 

 counting the new installation at Lagens do Pico which is not yet operating, only four of them include 

 modern factories. The others number eleven try-works stations (all but one with whaleboats operating 

 directly from them), and six stations for whaleboats only. It is the object of the next section to describe 

 in detail the equipment and the methods of hunting and of processing whales in this open boat fishery 

 as it survives today. 



THE PRESENT SURVIVAL OF OPEN BOAT WHALING 



The open boat whaling of the Azores is a relic industry which, surprisingly enough, has spread 

 rather than dwindled in the North Atlantic in recent years. That it should have spread from the Azores 

 to Madeira in 1941 (p. 350), and that on the coast of Brazil open boats should have begun to take whales 

 in 1950 (Norsk Hvalfangsttid. 1952, p. 499), are healthy signs in the survival of the ancient trade. There 

 are no details available of the tiny revival in Brazil, but the whalemen concerned are almost certainly 

 immigrants from the Azores (p. 295). 



Elsewhere in the world the practice of open boat whaling is outmoded and obsolete. The last deep- 

 sea voyages in the old style were completed when the schooners Margarett and John R. Manta 

 returned to New Bedford in 1925. The shore fishery on the eastern seaboard of North America, where 

 as early as 1645 the settlers of Southampton, Long Island, had regulations for whaling, came to an 

 appropriate end in 1918 when a Right whale was harpooned at Amagansett, Long Island (Starbuck, 

 1878; Edwards & Rattray, 1932). At Twofold Bay, West Australia, once a famous centre for bay 

 whaling, there lingered a seasonal open boat Humpback fishery until 1932 when, according to Dakin 

 (1934), the two remaining whaleboats ceased to operate. Old-style bay whaling in New Zealand had 

 vanished years earlier, when in 19 10 at Whangamumu, Bay of Islands, the open boat and hand harpoon 

 were replaced by steam catchers which took over the Humpback whaling there (Ommaney, 1933). The 

 Yankee whaleboats which once hunted on the Peru coast have since been copied by Peruvian fisher- 

 men, but it is not clear that these boniteras are used for whaling (Norsk Hvalfangsttid. 1952, p. 73). 

 In high northern latitudes the natives still hunt Right whales from open boats when opportunity 

 affords. But recent accounts show that hand weapons for Right whaling are obsolete, at least among 

 the Alaskan and Canadian Esquimaux, who now use swivel-guns, shoulder-guns with bomb-lances, 

 and darting-guns (Valin, 1945; Anderson, 1947; Brower, 1948, p. 103). In this there is no comparison 

 with the Azores where the abandoning of explosives binds them much closer to tradition. In the 

 northern fisheries for the White whale or Beluga, small types of hand harpoon and lance are still used 

 for despatching the captures (Vladykov, 1944, p. 32); but this species, despite its name, is a dolphin 

 of no great size, and the actual capturing is done with stake-nets. In certain parts of the South Seas, 

 such as the Tonga Islands, the hand harpoon still survives, but here also the present native fishery is, 

 I believe, only for dolphins and porpoises. 



It is surprising that the survival of shore whaling in the Azores, as singular as it is outmoded, should 

 for so long have attracted scant attention from travellers and students of whaling. Except for one 

 reference by Jenkins (1921, p 249) there was virtually nothing written outside Portugal about the 

 Azores fishery until Knudsen's short note (1946) when, as a member of the Atlantide Expedition, he 

 had visited the whaling station at Horta, Fayal, though not at a time when whales were being hunted 

 or worked up. Recently, a brief, popular account by R. J. Houk appeared in the Norsk Hvalfangsttid. 

 (1952, p. 667). I have contributed an article to the same journal (Clarke, 1953). Shortly before my 

 departure for the Azores in 1949 I was able to see Figueiredo's valuable monograph, mainly describing 

 the present condition of the industry, published in Portuguese in 1946. 



