226 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



less, only two British ships sailed for the whaling grounds that season, 

 and both were privately owned. 



This bounty was in the form of twenty shillings per ton on all ships 

 over two hundred tons fitted out in Britain. Despite this govern- 

 mental generosity on the part of officials entrusted with the disburse- 

 ment of pubUc funds derived from taxes and excise, British whaling 

 stubbornly continued to languish. In fact, it practically collapsed, so 

 that even four years later only four British-registered ships indulged 

 the extravagance of such voyages. One of these took seven whales, 

 the others none. 



Nor did Britons show any more enthusiasm for the business when 

 the bounty was raised to thirty shillings a ton in 1740. Their best 

 effort then was to fit out five ships, two of which were immediately 

 lost to privateers in the then current war with Spain, while two 

 others never even reached the whaling grounds but went off on 

 piratical exploits of their own. It was not until the bounty was again 

 raised to forty shiUings in 1750 that certain independent merchants 

 of London and some other ports began to take an interest in the pos- 

 sibilities of the business. This was the bounty that applied also to 

 whalers built in the colonies, which so encouraged the New England- 

 ers, but which was then promptly nullified, in their case, by contrary 

 restrictions. 



By 1760, however, matters showed a decided statistical improve- 

 ment, at least in the number of ships, but the proceeds from the little 

 fleet of thirty-five vessels, mostly privately owned and out of Lon- 

 don, Hull, and Whitby, were still, in the aggregate, on the debit 

 side. Only one vessel actually showed a profit, and this was a Scottish 

 whaler out of Dundee. The Scots had entered the trade in 1750, and 

 although they never had a large fleet and each port and even each 

 owner in each port remained ruggedly independent about the whole 

 business, they made a much better job of the endeavor, showed a 

 considerably greater profit over the years, and remained much longer 

 in the field. The reasons for this will be discussed later when we come 

 to the specific part they played in the over-all history of whaling. 



The most essential feature of English whaling enterprise — as dis- 

 tinct from the Scottish — was, however, that the entrepreneurs never 

 truly comprehended the operation and never recognized it as some- 

 thing quite different from common fisheries. To the English it was al- 



