3 io DISCOVERY REPORTS 



present one as sea boats and sailers, but from what I have seen in the boats, pulling or sailing on tireless 

 rapid manoeuvres in windless heavy swells or moderate wind and sea, they can today certainly equal 

 and perhaps challenge Ashley's justified boast that the Yankee whaleboat, as finally evolved, was ' the 

 most perfect water craft that has ever floated '. 



To impress the completeness of the Azores survival of whaleboat, gear and ' craft ', Table 6 (p. 314) 

 shows in summary form the main construction features and complete equipment of a late nineteenth- 

 century American boat fitted for Sperm whaling compared with those of a present Azores whale boat. 

 As earlier mentioned (p. 293), the survival of old-time whaling extends to common speech, to several 

 Yankee whaling terms used by the Azores whalemen : therefore, elaborating on Table 3 and explaining 

 terms and usages, I include in the following description the Azores phonetic spelling in brackets after 

 a New England term, where a word in English of the old-style whaling remains unaltered and un- 

 translated in the conversation of these Portuguese whalemen. Besides the photographs and stills from 

 the cine-film (Plates XIII and XV), illustrating the survival generally, this account of whaleboat and 

 boat-gear is helped out by photographs of a model boat and its equipment, an exact replica built by 

 a whaleboat builder of Pico (Plate XIV). 



The whaleboat. The Azores whaleboats are always called canoas dos baleieros or, simply, canoas. This 

 name reaches back beyond the Yankee tradition and is an everyday reminder of the origin of the New 

 England whaleboats, and even of the source and inspiration of New England whaling, for the colonists 

 of Massachusetts, although early influenced by English and Dutch models, got some of their whaling 

 practice from the Nattick Indians who showed them the primitive employment of the Red Indian 

 canoe in shore whaling, and later sailed for many decades as harponeers and boatmen in the deep-sea 

 ventures. The canoe origin is still apparent in the general aspect of the whaleboat, and particularly in 

 the gradual tapering from the midships beam towards both ends, as compared with the independently 

 evolved English whaleboats, which were nearly uniform in width so far as bows and quarter where 

 they were sharply rounded in. 



All the Azores boats are built locally. Fitted complete with all equipment a whaleboat in 1950 cost 

 about 4000 escudos or £500. Most boats are 37 or 38 ft. long, but there are some of 34 or 35 ft., and 

 I have seen a 30-ft. boat at Porto do Castelo, Santa Maria. Probably the latter carries six men only, 

 for as late as 1937 the figures in Estatistica das Pescas show that the whaleboats of Santa Maria were 

 six-man boats. But the overwhelming rule in the Azores is the long seven-man boat. There is a boat- 

 header in charge at the tiller or steering-oar, and six men paddling or pulling. This appears to have been 

 general practice since about the turn of the century. The first locally built boat, by Francisco Jose 

 Machado in 1894, followed the standard pattern of American whaleboats of the time and was 28 ft. 

 long with a crew of six. The present Azores boats are not without precedent, either for crew number 

 or length, in open boat whaling since the boats of the English Greenland fishery, although only 

 26 or 28 ft. long, commonly employed seven men (Scoresby, 1820, 11, p. 222), and on two occasions 

 only the Americans built experimental boats, for towing and for Sulphur-bottom* whaling respectively, 

 which were 36 and 38 ft. long with seven and nine pulling oars (Brown, 1887, p. 241). The standard 

 American whaleboat never got beyond the length of 30 ft. adopted in the 1890's, and 1 assume this 

 limit was imposed by the requirements of pelagic whaling. A larger, heavier boat would have occupied 

 too much of the ship's length when hoisted on a three or four-boat ship, and would have been more 

 difficult to hoist on the falls : moreover the whaleboat was (and remains today) of extraordinarily light 

 construction, and when hoisted as a dead weight its keel had to be supported on ' cranes ' to prevent 

 sagging, so that a longer boat would probably have been liable to break its back even upon the cranes 

 in the stress of weather and of the ship working. But no boats are hoisted in the shore whaling of the 



* 'Sulphur-bottom' was the American term for the Blue whale. 



