Softly Comes the Dawn 129 



by the glare of the fire, Captain Frangois Sopite stands on the poop 

 deck smiling wryly. The men see this and grin too. 



Although we have no actual written record of this event, we can 

 safely reconstruct its details from a wide range of other sources, 

 some of them eyewitness accounts of the same process at later dates. 

 This particular instance, however, constituted one of the four most 

 important events in the whole ten thousand years of known whal- 

 ing history. What is more, it is the first truly historical event in this 

 industry, because we have the name of the man who initiated it, and 

 we know a considerable amount about him and his background. 

 The great experiment of the Basque Captain Fran9ois Sopite Zaburu, 

 of St. Jean de Luz, as we now call the port, made at the end of 

 the sixteenth century altered the whole course of whaling and, oc- 

 curring when it did, contributed to the general expansion of Europe 

 overseas in a way that has seldom, if ever, been fully appreciated. 

 The other great discoveries that altered whaling practice were those 

 of Captain Christopher Hussey of New England, who initiated 

 sperming a century later, of Svend Foyn of Norway, who invented 

 the harpoon gun in the middle of the nineteenth century, and, 

 finally, of Captain Carl Anton Larsen, who built the first real fac- 

 tory ship in 1923. 



This was the first occasion that we know of definitely when the 

 products for which the whale has always been sought — oil and 

 baleen — were extracted on the high seas, and by its successful con- 

 clusion it released the industry from one of its most cramping as- 

 pects. However, as is the case with so many great inventions, it was 

 the outcome of necessity brought about by the march of much 

 wider events — in this instance two in number. First, the only whales 

 that could be hunted on the open sea at that time were certain spe- 

 cies known in English as the right whales — simply because they 

 were the right ones to hunt and this because they floated when dead. 

 All others sank, and as the idea of the heavy ballista of the old Norse 

 had been either lost or never adopted outside of Norway, hand har- 

 pooning from small boats was the only means of capture, and with 

 these weapons only light lines could be employed which would not 

 hold up a whale that sank when killed. 



