Midmorjiing by the Ice 165 



possessed other qualities with which neither the Basques nor any 

 other peoples who had followed the whale previously — with the 

 possible exception of the Phoenicians, of whose industry we know 

 so little — seem to have been endowed. They were basically traders 

 and businessmen and they had a strong constructive and mechanical 

 bent, while they were then, as now, most methodical in all they did. 

 Although it was never so stated in print, as far as I know, they were 

 obviously appalled by the waste and uncertainty of whaUng as car- 

 ried on by the Basques and by the lack of a definite business policy as 

 displayed by their only rivals, the British. They therefore set out to 

 overcome these inefficiencies in every way possible. This they ac- 

 complished in three phases: first, by the establishment of semi- 

 permanent shore stations; second, by convoying their fleets with 

 men-of-war; and third, by introducing two mechanical novelties and 

 two important refinements to the industrial process as a whole. They 

 did all of this within a decade, but it was more than two centuries 

 later before their industrial improvements were universally adopted. 

 As a result they took the lead in following the whale and held it for 

 about two hundred years. 



The Dutch idea of shore stations to which dead whales could be 

 towed for processing probably stemmed from some very ancient 

 practices that had been carried on along their own coasts, and to 

 the north by the Frisians, and to the south by the Flemings, since the 

 Dark Ages. In a work entitled De la Translation et des Miracles de 

 Saint Waast, being a life of Saint Arnold, Bishop of Soisson in the 

 eleventh century, it is mentioned that there was already such an off- 

 shore whaling industry on the Flanders coast in 875 a.d. That was at 

 the height of the Norse viking raids, and considered in conjunction 

 with the Norsemen's own whaling, the dialogue of Aelfric in Saxon 

 England, and what we have seen of early Basque enterprise, it gives 

 us an entirely new picture of the west European seaboard in the 

 Dark Ages. It now appears that everybody from Finmark to Gibral- 

 tar was engaged in whaling, for the Danes had a porpoise fishery 

 from earliest times, and there are references to the Portuguese 

 marketing whale products in the ninth century. We will eventually 

 discover that this did not apply to western Europe alone, but to all 

 the oceanic coasts of the Northern Hemisphere. 



When the Basques first built ships large enough to follow the 



