viii Introductory 



these most unapproachable and aloof creatures, and the results have 

 not yet been published in popular form. Moreover, the findings of 

 Mackintosh, Frazer, and others who undertook these studies at the 

 Antarctic whaling grounds, have completely set at naught a very 

 great deal of all that had been previously believed about the lives 

 and habits of these animals. These discoveries go far towards ex- 

 plaining the remarkable plethora of contradictions found in many 

 older works. As a result of these two shortcomings in the extant 

 literature on both whaling and the whales themselves — namely that 

 ninety-six per cent of the history is customarily ignored and that 

 our knowledge of the whales per se has until very recently been 

 more or less negligible — there is a deplorable lack of perspective in 

 the popular conception of the whole subject. This is regrettable be- 

 cause whaling has played a part in our history that, in certain re- 

 spects, is second to no other human enterprise, and whale products 

 have always been and still are of very great importance to our 

 economy. 



The story that follows is an attempt to display this fascinating 

 facet of human endeavor in some semblance of its entirety and in 

 proper perspective by a process of corralling the forgotten and 

 more neglected aspects of whaling history and the new discoveries 

 about the whales themselves, and weaving them into a continuous 

 web of narrative. It is primarily natural history, in both senses of 

 that term' It is the history of man's conquest of the sea, a saga with 

 a theme solnexorable that it can only be described as natural, and it 

 is a natural history of a group of animals than which there are none 

 more mysterious or romantic in the worlcpTo follow the whale is 

 to follow the whole course of one of the mt)st important and signifi- 

 cant aspects of our own history. It is virtually the story of the con- 

 quest of our planet. 



Our association with whales is extraordinary in that we have al- 

 most nothing in common apart from certain anatomical generalities, 

 and in some cases a liking for herrings, yet it began somewhere in 

 the mists of prehistory and has continued unabated through the 

 ages. The common denominator is the sea. The story is, however, un- 

 like the stories told in other history books. It is not concerned with 

 the rise and fall of empires, the glorification of human personaUties, 

 and the slaughter of nations. Apart from half a dozen names that 



