228 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



Davis Strait and Baffin Bay to the west of Greenland. This fishery 

 was concentrated upon the arctic right whale, or "bowhead," and 

 what black right whales still remained. The products sought were both 

 oil and baleen, called "whalebone" or, often, even more mislead- 

 ingly, "fins," and both commanded a very fine price. The Holland- 

 ers had long before established the methods of hunting these whales 

 and they had been enormously successful in trying them out at sea, 

 the practice which had originally been devised by the Basques. In 

 fact, the Hollanders learned it from those people when the supply of 

 black right whales began to run out within towing distance of their 

 Spitsbergen shore stations. 



When we speak of the "Dutch" as opposed to "Hollanders," or use 

 the word as an adjective, it must be understood that we are using the 

 title in the purist sense, for although Hollanders are Dutchmen to the 

 rest of the world, not all "Dutchmen" are Hollanders by any means. 

 And so it was with the so-called "Dutch" whale fleet. Most of the 

 vessels were built, based, and owned in Holland, but almost every 

 port from Flanders to Jutland was engaged in the trade, with Fri- 

 sians, Holsteiners, Danes and Jutlanders, and many inland Germans 

 employed upon the vessels as seamen. All these North-Sea-men had 

 very close ties with their East Anglian fishermen counterparts, de- 

 spite the fact that their respective countries were often at war, so it 

 was natural that the merchants of Hull, Whitby, and even London 

 should turn to them for skilled help in managing their new fleet of 

 whalers. The British and the Hollanders were, as a matter of fact, 

 more often at war than at peace throughout the preliminary period 

 of construction during the middle part of the eighteenth century, so 

 that we find a preponderance of Frisians and Holsteiners in the early 

 EngHsh whalers. And it was from them that the English seamen 

 learned about whaling — and they learned both well and fast, so that 

 they won praise even from the surly Hollanders for their skillful 

 seamanship and patient labor. But what they learned was not enough, 

 for it was in this period that the whalers encountered for the first 

 time a new problem — ice. 



The truth of the matter was that nobody really understood the 

 Arctic Ice in those days and it was two centuries later before a 

 true concept of it was pieced together by modern scientific in- 

 vestigations. In the eighteenth century, however, it lay like a vast 



