230 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



whalers in 1775 who spent a season in the South Atlantic and sailed 

 into higher latitudes. The results were not economically a success, 

 but the next year a special bounty promulgated for the so-called 

 "southern fishery" prompted further effort. Added encouragement 

 was derived from an Act restricting American whaling, resultant 

 upon the revolt of the colonists. The outcome was still uneconomic, 

 and the effort languished, though a few ships persisted almost every 

 year for more than a decade and gradually extended their voyages 

 to the southern tip of South America. Then, two notable events took 

 place at opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean. 



AustraHa had been discovered by Captain Jansz in 1606, and New 

 Zealand by Cook in 1769. Nothing had been done about either and it 

 was not till 1786 that the first shipload of so-called "convicts" was 

 dumped at the famous Botany Bay in Queensland on the latter. The 

 same year, the first small fleet of South Sea whalers out of London 

 made a determined attempt to fish the other side of the Pacific by 

 sailing directly to and around Cape Horn. Both enterprises were 

 noticeable for their inefficient conduct and virtual failure, but both 

 stimulated further and more concerted effort. 



Constantly prodded by the independent merchants and by the 

 erstwhile directors of and the remaining investors in the ill-begotten 

 South Sea Company, which had by then exploded in the famous 

 "bubble," the government set about systematically emptying the jails 

 and bundling their inmates off to Australia, on the one hand, while 

 they released naval personnel and tonnage, on the other, to survey 

 the southeast area of the Pacific via the Horn. In 1792, H.M.S. Rattler 

 went to that area and conducted a survey that carried her north to 

 the equator up the west coast of South America to the great sperming 

 grounds; but, although she attempted whaling, she met with no suc- 

 cess in this field. These enterprises initiated the first period of suc- 

 cessful British whaling, for the northern fishery in the Greenland seas 

 was being beset by an ever-mounting number of difficulties and ob- 

 structions. Worst of these were certain concomitants of the almost 

 endless wars in which the British were involved throughout the 

 latter half of the eighteenth century. 



With the usual and always surprising lack of over-all planning for 

 which the British have become famous, the iniquitous method of re- 

 cruiting mariners known as "press ganging" was not only encouraged 



