X Introductory 



pean — one Snorri Karlsef ni — was born in North America, and on 

 that very coast to boot, just five hundred years before Colombo 

 sighted the West Indies. But you have to go back in time twice as 

 far again to find the man who gave us the earliest written record of a 

 whaling enterprise — to King Assur-Na9ir-Pal of Assyria, who tells 

 us in a legend on stone of the exploits of his predecessor. King 

 Tiglath-Pileser I. Nor is that all; you must again double, or perhaps 

 treble, your journey back in time if you wish to stand contemporary 

 with the Stone Age men of the North Sea who left us the earhest 

 records of having followed the whale. If the Early Stone Age men 

 of Portugal went a-whaling with their huge harpoons, you must 

 step three times further back again into the mists of prehistory. 



Then there is another matter that necessitates careful considera- 

 tion if we are to obtain a proper understanding of the history and 

 significance of our subject. Whaling is a marine affair and must 

 therefore be viewed primarily from that angle. In order to appre- 

 ciate the procedure, we must put ourselves in the place of the 

 whalers. It is essential, in fact, to forget the geography of land 

 masses, such as we learn in school and see in all our atlases, and ob- 

 serve instead the conformity and distribution of seas and oceans. To 

 do this, maps have to be constructed from what may be called an 

 aquacentric point of view, whereon oceans take the place of conti- 

 nents, shallow seas of islands, currents of rivers, strings of islands 

 that of mountain ranges, and narrow channels that of isthmuses. 

 Furthermore, the maps in our atlases are constructed upon projec- 

 tions that often give a quite erroneous impression of marine dis- 

 tances and directions, and of the relative positions of surrounding 

 land masses. All of them point north for no really vahd reason. Not 

 even navigational charts show the seas in a truly aquacentric man- 

 ner. What is needed, therefore, is an entirely new approach, of the 

 kind that the air age has forced upon global flyers (see Note on 

 Maps, page xix). 



Just as the continents are fringed with promontories great and 

 small, and with a host of islands, so also are the oceans bordered 

 with gulfs and surrounded by a diadem of seas. There is a difference, 

 however, for a land-island, to be an island, must be entirely sepa- 

 rated from the continental land, whereas sea-islands are of two 

 kinds. There are those like the Caspian Sea that are entirely sepa- 



