154 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



ships. Then, they would send out a fleet of heavily armed ships and 

 engage in wholesale privateering, only to lapse once again the next 

 year and let unarmed fishermen brave the elements and the wrath of 

 all the combined foreign fleets. However, despite all this inefficiency 

 and the deplorable interorganizational squabbles between officialdom, 

 shipowners, ships' captains, the directors of the company, and its 

 shareholders, it was the determined actions of the Dutch that finally 

 forced the British to give up. Having built a seasonal settlement with 

 a fort in Spitsbergen, the Dutch took to convoying their whaling 

 fleet with men-of-war, as we shall see. After 1625 the British quit, 

 and out of a merchant fleet of 1400 ships only 18 remained in the 

 whaling industry, and these mostly as part-time privateers. 



This first British whaling period is a curious little incident, of, at 

 the most, some quarter of a century's duration, in the immense sweep 

 of millennia during which the art has been carried on, but it laid a 

 very important foundation for much that came later. The British are 

 as notoriously stubborn as they are ponderously slow, and their em- 

 pire was built as much by the labor of others as by their own very 

 real initiative. Having once seen the profits that could be made out 

 of whaling, but having found out that they were totally incapable 

 of extracting these for themselves, they went quietly to work to find 

 out who else they could get to do the job for them. They made four 

 separate attempts during the next three hundred years — the first 

 three almost equally unsuccessful, although they acquired a lot of 

 other worthwhile property along the way, purely as a side line — 

 but finally they succeeded, and in no uncertain terms, in our present 

 century by putting up the money to finance the Norwegians to catch 

 and process the whales on a lot of otherwise useless British Antarctic 

 islands, and finally collecting the profits on the sale of oil to other 

 countries. 



It is not because the English, neither at this time or later, pursued 

 any one particular whale that we chose to describe them first in as- 

 sociation with the wicked killer, an animal on which no special in- 

 dustry has ever been founded. This choice was deliberately, though 

 perhaps rather maliciously, made because the habits of the latter in 

 some respects mirror those of the former. Both are predominantly 

 predacious in their whaling endeavor, and both, in the long run, are 

 extremely adept at it. Both can and do subsist for the most part on 



