3 l8 DISCOVERY REPORTS 



The American whalemen seldom used the term ' harpoon ' either as noun or verb. They called the 

 harpoon an ' iron '. The kind used today in the Azores is the iron which became standard in the 

 American whale fishery during the second half of the last century. It was invented in 1848 by James 

 Temple, a negro of New Bedford, who made ' whalecraft ', that is, was a blacksmith engaged in working 

 from iron the special utensils or ' craft ' of the whaling trade. Before this time the harpoon commonly 

 employed was much the same as that known to Edge : it had a fixed saggitate head with two barbs or 

 ' flues ', although a one-flued iron became popular in the 1840's, only to be swept away by the superior 

 ' Temple's Gig '. The simplest, besides most successful, of many toggle and other experimental irons 

 invented in that period, the Temple iron has a sharpened pivoted head, which, after being darted in 

 the whale, swings out, as soon as it takes the strain, from its former position along the shaft to one at 

 right-angles to the shaft, and so toggles the harpoon within the whale's tissues. It enters the whale 

 easily, and its special advantage is obvious : it is much less likely to ' draw ' than the two-flued iron with 

 fixed flues. The original Temple iron had the toggle pivoted in a channel at the end of the shank, but 

 it soon gave place to the standard form as used in the late nineteenth century in American whaling and 

 in the Azores today. In this the toggle and not the shank is channelled. 



Because of the unique place the hand harpoon and lance have in whaling history, the following 

 account describes in detail the craft, the method of mounting them, and their employment in the boat. 

 (By ' mounting ' is meant the rigging of the iron or lance to a wooden pole ready for the chase.) The 

 remarks apply equally to the American design and employment, unless stated otherwise. The measure- 

 ments in Table 7, from mounted craft kindly presented by Reis e Martins Lda., are recorded as typical, 

 but there are of course some few inches or so variation in the sizes of poles and straps in use. Brown 

 (1884) gives a few measurements for the American iron and lance and these agree closely with those 

 in the table, except that the Azores lance-head is rather more than an inch longer than Brown's 

 specification. 



The single toggle flue or head of the harpoon is made from cast steel. There is one shallow barb on 

 the back edge behind the keenly sharpened tip. The channelled throat of the flue is drilled to receive 

 the steel pivot, or hinge-pin, borne on the flattened end of the shank. To keep the flue swivelled back 

 parallel to the shank, a small wooden pin, about the thickness of a matchstick and cut off flush with 

 the metal, is fitted tightly into a hole drilled through the flue and the embraced shank, a little below 

 the pivot. As soon as there is strain on the fastened iron, the pin snaps and the flue swings out and 

 toggles the instrument. All harpoons are ' marked craft ', that is, the heads are stamped with the initials 

 of the whaling company and usually with the year the harpoon is put into service. Marking craft with 

 the ship's name and date was customary from the early days of English and American whaling, when 

 it served to settle disputes of priority which sometimes arose when boats from rival ships fastened to 

 the same whale. The practice survives in the Azores, where companies in rivalry (p. 334) can also 

 appeal to marked craft. The shank of the harpoon is not made of steel but of tough wrought iron so 

 that it will bend and not snap during the strains and turns of the captured whale. At the end of the 

 shank the hollow wrought iron socket swells gradually to its base so that it looks like a tall cone. The 

 total length of the Azores toggle iron is about 2 ft. 9 in., which is correct for an American Sperm whale 

 iron. In the American Arctic fishery the Bowhead iron was about a foot longer, for the whalemen 

 recognized that Right whales in high latitudes have especially thick blubber so that a longer shank was 

 necessary to ensure that the iron could penetrate the blubber and toggle in the meat. 



The American method of mounting an iron, used in the Azores, is the same as that employed in the 

 Greenland fishery in Scoresby's time (1820, 11, p. 230), when it was called spanning-in. I watched an 

 iron being mounted at Capelo, Fayal, in 1949, and the whole operation, including the shaping of the 

 pole, took about half an hour. A harponeer usually mounts his own irons. With a small file the toggle 



