150 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



enormous black and white head rushes up from the depths and opens 

 a cavernous mouth with both jaws ringed by great yellow teeth; it 

 lunges at the nearest man, dragging him under. Amid cries of horror 

 the others slide below the water, only to appear immediately swim- 

 ming for the big floe with the insanity of pure horror in their eyes. 

 But the narrow space separating them from their companions and 

 comparative safety is now suddenly filled with gigantic forms that 

 rush at them, literally snapping them in two or hauHng them bodily 

 below. Only four of fifteen men who have set out are finally pulled 

 out of the water to safety, while the ravenous monsters of the sea 

 now rush at the big floe, trying to smash it from below or actually, 

 it seems, to leap upon it. Utterly abandoned and lost, the men huddle 

 around Captain Burkett in the middle of the ice to await their end, 

 which is now inevitable, either from hunger, drowning, or the at- 

 tacks of these beasts they know so well — the dreadful killers, the 

 most terrible flesh-eating animals on earth. 



In this story the names and dates have been altered, but not too 

 much, and this for a specific purpose. There was a ship named the 

 Mary Margaret^ with a Captain Steven Benet as her master and with 

 a Mr. Thomas Edge aboard as company agent, that killed one small 

 whale and five hundred walrus in Thomas Smyth's Bay in Spits- 

 bergen in June, 1 6 1 1 , and which was then lost with all hands on the 

 return voyage. The story is fully recorded, but we constructed a 

 purely fictitious counterpart in order to bring to the fore a number 

 of the basic inefficiencies that plagued the history of the Muscovy 

 Company, which was England's first corporate effort to enter the 

 whaling industry, and which was one of the most colossal failures in 

 commercial history. Notable among these inefficiencies were inade- 

 quate ships, interference by the company in maritime affairs, lack of 

 experience, and failure to even try to cooperate with other nations. 



Despite the Dutch claim to having discovered Spitsbergen in 1 596, 

 there is no doubt that an Englishman named Hugh Willoughby at 

 least sighted it in 1553 while on a planned voyage to "discover" a 

 northeast route round the North Cape to Russia — itself a strangely 

 redundant effort in view of the voyage of Ohthere over five hundred 

 years before. However, it now appears from the study of ancient 



