Introductory ix 



stand out more in retrospect than through renown — names that few 

 if any have heard, like Tiglath-Pileser, Ohthere the Bold, Frangois 

 Sopite, Christopher Hussey, Samuel Enderby, Svend Foyn, and 

 Carl Anton Larsen — this is a history in which man is almost anony- 

 mous. Strangely enough, the animals are similarly retiring for, un- 

 til recently, they have been just whales, as the men were just whalers. 

 Yet the story is one of courage and drama, excitement and danger, 

 romance and horror, and it maintains throughout an underlying 

 motif of tragedy and pathos that is sometimes hard to tolerate. It is 

 a saga of the triumph of the puny and of the twilight of the mighty. 



There are several concurrent themes to this story that may best 

 be postulated by means of six simple questions. Why did men go 

 whaHng; who among men have done so; when did they go; where 

 did they go; how did they get there; and what did they^nd? Each 

 question involves a different inquiry, but the answers, ^hen found, 

 mesh so exactly, like a warp and weft, that we can clearly discern a 

 continuous pattern across the resulting cloth — a pattern that pro- 

 ceeds in an orderly manner by regular steps not only in point of 

 historical time but also with respect to the men involved, the places 

 they went, the ships they went in, and the whales they followed. 

 However, if we are to appreciate this pattern fully, we have to see 

 it in proper perspective, and in order to do this, we cannot just cut 

 a block out of the middle of the cloth. We must view it as a whole, 

 complete with its borders, so that the origin of the design and its 

 ultimate fulfillment may be seen. It is, in fact, essential that we first 

 obtain some concept of the time scale of the history of whaling. 



Time is a relative thing and hard for man to comprehend. Our 

 own lives are so short that the periods of time with which we must 

 deal in this story have little meaning unless charted in some simple 

 visual form and pointed up with high lights that are both notable 

 and in some way susceptible to everyday comparison. The charts on 

 pages xvii and 370 will perhaps make the matter clearer and demon- 

 strate better than any words the immensity of whaling history. 



To us, the date of the sailing of the first deep-sea whaler from 

 Nantucket is something of the olden times, but to the captain of 

 that vessel the landing of the first colonists on those same shores was 

 just as ancient. To those colonists, in turn, the voyages of Cristoforo 

 Colombo were already profoundly historic, and yet the first Euro- 



