l66 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



whales north on their migrations, they immediately appeared off the 

 coast of Holland. They may have arrived there as early as 900 a.d. 

 and were certainly there by 1300 a.d. It is further recorded that 

 Dutch pilot boats attended these Basque whalers and sometimes took 

 their kills ashore for processing. Then again, the Hollanders were 

 originally riverine-gulfine, as opposed to insular-peninsular, seamen, 

 and would naturally tend to prefer shore stations to open-sea opera- 

 tions; they were already most highly skilled port engineers because 

 of the configuration of their own home coast, with its endless dikes 

 and canals. The erection of a base overseas on even the most in- 

 hospitable shore presented no problems to them. 



Just when they first began high-seas whaling is still obscure, but 

 as early as 1 614 we read of a new company being formed with a 

 three-year charter to "Trade and Fish from the United Netherlands 

 on or to the Coasts of the Lands between Nova Zemblya and 

 Fretum Davidis, including Spitzbergen, Beer-en-Eiland, and Green- 

 land." This would seem to indicate, first, that they already had a 

 fleet with crews versed in the practice of whaling — though, as we 

 know, employing Basque harpooners and flensers — and second, that 

 they had considerable knowledge of North Atlantic and Arctic 

 waters. 



Their progress from 161 2 till 1626, when they completed Smeeren- 

 berg, was, however, cautious in the extreme. In 161 2 one Dutch ship 

 with a British pilot visited Spitsbergen; the following year two came; 

 and in 1614 none at all; but after the foundation of the new com- 

 pany in that year, fourteen ships went there, and this number rose 

 steadily until it was twenty-three in 161 8, fifty- two by 1621, and 

 to what is described as great force in 1623 when the fleet included 

 five-hundred-ton ships that brought timber and other materials to 

 build the semipermanent or seasonal settlement, such as has already 

 been described, at Smeerenburg. In 1625 the British more or less gave 

 up, and the following year the Hollanders started going to the 

 northwest ice in earnest because the black right whales were already 

 becoming extremely scarce around Spitsbergen. However, Smeeren- 

 burg remained the Hollanders' summer depot for half a century, and 

 they continued to use it even longer as a shore station for processing 

 their catches. 



The incident that initiated the second phase of Dutch dominance 



