224 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



cause at all, accomplished has not as yet been properly appreciated. 

 And the part played by the whale in their efforts has been almost 

 totally ignored. 



When the British decided to make another attempt at whaling after 

 their dismal failure under the Muscovy Company in the first quarter 

 of the seventeenth century, they were immediately beset by all kinds 

 of problems that were never encounterd by any others who engaged 

 in this industry. One of the worst was the practice of press ganging, 

 which, in the aggregate, probably caused more losses than all the 

 foundering of ships, the interferences of officialdom, and the bun- 

 gling of financiers put together. But despite these and all manner of 

 other tribulations, whaling out of British ports continued uninter- 

 ruptedly from this second start until the end of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, albeit with great fluctuations. 



This interlude in whaling history is hard to define and most diffi- 

 cult to comprehend unless two points are made abundantly clear. 

 The first is the somewhat confusing fact that it began only a few 

 years after the Yankee deep-sea whaling, but then outlasted the 

 American effort, thus bridging three whole phases of the latter and 

 the two intervening interludes of almost complete cessation caused 

 by the War of Independence and the War of 1812. Secondly, al- 

 though this phase of British whaling has almost always been treated 

 historically as an entity, and also appears thus in the official statistics 

 and other records, it was, in point of fact, composed of two quite 

 separate and almost wholly unrelated activities. One was conducted 

 in the Arctic, had to contend with the novel phenomenon of ice, and 

 was relatively unremunerative; the other was tropical and encoun- 

 tered entirely other challenges, but was considerably profitable. The 

 former eventually triumphed, but then succumbed to a child of its 

 own initiative; the latter just died on the stem and became extinct. 



The new start was actually made in 1725 and was to a great ex- 

 tent prompted by reports of the Nantucketers' new successes leading 

 from Captain Hussey's discovery. A number of prominent London 

 financiers, backed to the hilt by certain moneyed landowners, had, in 

 171 1, maneuvered the Crown into chartering a monumental enter- 

 prise called the South Sea Company which they stated would liqui- 

 date the national debt. Armed with their charter, the organizers 

 raised an enormous sum by private and public subscription through 



