THE PRESENT SURVIVAL OF OPEN BOAT WHALING 317 



boat, particularly in the confined water of landing places where sometimes there is scarcely room for 

 oars in the transit between launching slip and motor tow-boat. 



In the present whale fishery, as in the old days, it is customary, when going on a whale under oars, 

 to boat the oars when within 100 yards or so of the dart, and to make the remaining distance with 

 paddles, since these make even less noise that the muffled oars. The practice is not invariable, for when 

 the chance of securing a dart depends absolutely on haste, as when a whale is thought nearly to have 

 ' had his spoutings out ' and therefore be ready to sound, then the quiet approach is sacrificed to speed 

 and the boat completes the distance still under oars. In Plate XV, Fig. 5, where a boat under oars is in 

 the moment of fastening, the whale is actually ' rounding out ', that is, arching its back preparatory to 

 peaking flukes and sounding : a moment later and the opportunity for the dart would have been lost. 

 When getting fast under oars the rowers, as soon as the iron is darted, backwater one stroke to clear 

 from the whale and then they peak their oars : this means that they shove the handles of their oars into 

 peak-cleats, holes cut into battens fixed to the ceiling opposite each rowlock. Oars boated in the 

 ordinary way might foul the running line, but with oars a-peak and neatly stowed and forming in fact 

 a guiding trough for the line, the boat can tow after the whale and yet be at once ready, when the 

 whale slackens, to haul slack line and then rapidly get out oars again for a pull alongside to make the 

 lance-thrusts. 



When a boat is pulling with utmost exertion to go on a whale, I have seen the boatheader keep one 

 hand only for his steering-oar and, with the palm of the other upon the loom of the after-oar, lend his 

 weight to every stroke taken by that oarsman, so that no source of effort might go unspared. This 

 backing of the after-oarsman is mentioned by Melville (185 1, p. 363), and by Ferguson in the 1880's 

 (1936, p. 181, posthumous), and it seems to have been a singular way they had in New England 

 because Cheever (1851, p. 132) makes the trick decisive in winning for the Americans a famous race 

 after a whale, rowed between whaleboats from four whalers of France, England, Portugal and America, 

 becalmed in the South Pacific. 



Hand harpoons and lances. In the history of seafaring trades there can scarcely be a more remarkable 

 survival than the present use in the Azores of hand weapons to take and kill great whales. Not only in 

 the weapons themselves, but in the precise division of their employment (the harpoon only for 

 fastening the whale by a rope to the boat, and then the lance for killing the fastened whale) the islanders 

 preserve a rigid continuity of technique which has now persisted for a period at least approaching 

 three and a half centuries. The Englishman Thomas Edge in 161 1, at 'Greenland' (that is, Spitz- 

 bergen) made some of the earliest captures of the Northern whale fishery. Purchas published in 1625 

 an account of the methods employed by Edge's Basque whalemen during these early voyages. His 

 description (edition 1905-7, xin, p. 27) remains a precise summary of Azores methods today. 



. . .the Harponyre, who standeth up in the head of the Boat, darteth his Harping-iron at the Whale with both his 

 hands, so soon as he commeth within his reach; wherewith the Whale being strucken, presently descendeth. . .and 

 therefore doe they reare out a rope of two hundred fathome, which is fastned to the Harping-iron, and lieth coyled 

 in the Boat . . . , and when they perceive him rising they hale in the rope to get neare him, and when the Whale 

 commeth up above water, then do the men lance him with their lances .... 



One may not trace this practice much farther back because the medieval Basque whalemen and the 

 American Indians encountered by the early colonists, employed mass methods involving numerous 

 boats, and darts, tridents and arrows associated with ropes and 'drugs' (p. 322) for entangling and 

 exhausting the whale: these methods are not comparable with the present survival. But the present- 

 day lance, for length and pattern, remains virtually as it was in Edge's time; and the present toggle 

 harpoon, although a great improvement on the old two-flued iron, can claim a primitive antecedent 

 in the bone-and-sinew toggles of Eskimo whaling and sealing. 



