Half -Light over Warm Seas 119 



that are unique. First, having been slow to develop sail, they started 

 whaling in large paddled or oar-propelled open boats that were 

 double-ended and distinctly canoe-shaped. They were probably de- 

 rived in the first instance from the Koro-pok-guru skin boats and 

 both carried seven or eight men. What is more, the Japanese whalers 

 maintained this tradition until the coming of the Yankee barques, 

 and even later until the arrival of the first Norwegian steam whalers. 

 They started building some merchant ships upon European lines in 

 the early eighteenth century, and they had previously very studi- 

 ously copied the Chinese junks, and both to good advantage, but 

 they do not appear ever to have employed either of these for whal- 

 ing except as sort of floating hostelries. There is absolutely not one 

 iota of evidence that they ever used them to carry the oared whal- 

 ing boats or to process the whales. This latter was invariably done 

 on shore, to which the whales were towed. 



If the pictures of their whaling are to be believed — and like all 

 Japanese illustrative records these devote tremendous care to detail 



— the whale simply never had a chance, for these industrious and 

 logical people did not rely on half a dozen little cockleshells as the 

 Yankees and almost everybody else had done. Instead, they rushed 

 upon the luckless beasts in positive armadas of fair-sized boats 

 driven by as many as thirty or forty oarsmen. Moreover, the num- 

 ber of harpoons with the traditional bladder floats attached that 

 they poked into the quarry apparently had no upper limit, so that 

 the whole sea looks as if it were covered with a vast spider's web 

 in many of the pictures. Then, just to make doubly sure, these in- 

 genious people invented still another trap to ensnare the poor crea- 

 tures. How they manipulated these is quite beyond our ken, though 

 I have talked to an ancient one in person in Japan who had assisted in 

 this function. He made it all sound very simple, but I still cannot see 

 how they managed to entangle a full-sized sei or right whale in a net; 

 however, that they did so, many foreign eyewitnesses can attest. The 

 resultant mess, as depicted in the illustrations, is so appalling that it 

 becomes an even more acute puzzle trying to fathom how they ever 

 disentangled the brute after it was killed. If you have tried to get a 

 small herring out of a raveled seine, you will know what I mean. 



The corpse, buoyed up by the countless bladders if it was a rorqual 



— and this explains how the Japanese alone were able to take these 



