44 THE AMERICAN WHALEMAN 



But a bowhead in the North Pacific was by no means identi- 

 cal with a right whale in the North Atlantic. Consequently 

 the later Arctic whaling had to develop certain technological 

 changes which, though far from revolutionary, were not in- 

 significant.*^ 



There were also, of course, minor improvements. Such 

 was the device of the toggle harpoon, which locked the iron 

 in the whale's flesh, and so increased the chances of remaining 

 fast to an animal which had been struck.^*^ Such, too, was the 

 gradual perfection of the strength of the whaleline, aristo- 

 crat of the world of ropes. And such, again, was the defeat 

 of scurvy through a more liberal and intelligent use of anti- 

 scorbutics. 



But in general it remained true that throughout its decades 

 of greatest activity the industry was unaffected by any major 

 or revolutionary changes. The crews of 1830 would have 

 found little that was unfamiliar in the vessels and equipment 

 of i860. Some tendencies had been accentuated and others 

 had disappeared J certain individual habits had entered the 

 traditions of the fishery j here and there was a new method 

 or an improved implement. But for descriptive and analyti- 

 cal purposes the period 1830 to i860 formed a unit: it was 

 made of whole cloth. The significant changes which did come 

 about were quantitative rather than qualitative: the develop- 

 ing differences were not those of kind, but of degree. Fig- 

 ures were of the essence of the fishery during these decades. 



Consequently the statistical summaries of whaling activ- 

 ity which were published annually (after 1843) ^Y ^^e 

 Whalemen's Shipping List and Merchant's Transcript, the 

 authoritative weekly organ of the industry, were of peculiar 



°A good account of the beginnings of this North Pacific whaling may be 

 found in Hunt's Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review for August, 

 1852, Vol. XXVII, pp. 227 f. Further descriptive material, presenting this 

 branch of the industry in some detail, is given by Clark. A. H., writing in 

 "Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States," VII, pp. 73-84; by 

 Starbuck, A., "History of the American Whale Fishery," pp. 96iT. ; and by 

 Jenkins, J. T., "History of the Whale Fisheries," pp. 234 ff. 



10 Other experiments with the harpoon, however, came to naught. The 

 average harpooner, justly proud of his own hand and eye, had little patience 

 with such new-fangled ideas as shooting harpoons from a gun, exploding 

 bombs containing everything from gunpowder to prussic acid within a whale's 

 vitals, or paralyzing a victim with at) elegtrig shock. 



