234 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



left an almost clear field and the number of British whalers rose 

 steadily from fifty in 1770 to two hundred and forty-seven in 1788, 

 of which no fewer than thirty-one were Scotsmen. Apart from the 

 Scots, however, almost the entire increase in the fleet was occasioned 

 by certain novel activities in the Pacific, which was just too far away 

 to make privateering feasible and where wonderful events were tak- 

 ing place. 



The ultimate decline in the northern whaling was caused basically 

 by the progressive extermination of the right whales in the North 

 Atlantic and Greenland seas, so that the whole enterprise finally be- 

 came uneconomical. In the South Pacific, however, early voyagers 

 found anew whales of the same or very closely related species in 

 enormous abundance. The British merchantmen who transported the 

 involuntary colonists to Australia were quick to notice this potential 

 harvest and they also soon learned that these southern whales had 

 most convenient habits. They migrated around a fixed route, arriving 

 in the bays, inlets, and river mouths of Tasmania, Australia, and New 

 Zealand on precise schedules every year. This was something un- 

 known in Europe since the time of the Basques and off the American 

 east coast for almost two centuries. The reports on this to their own- 

 ers by ships' captains prompted such perspicacious men as the En- 

 derbys to divert as many whalers as possible to the Australian run 

 and to supply their ordinary merchantmen visiting those seas with 

 whaling equipment. It was in 1789 that Sam Enderby sent the first 

 British whaler, the Emilia^ into the Pacific via the Horn. She was a 

 blunt-nosed, tubby, three-masted vessel built specially for sperming 

 with a try-works amidships on deck, which set the pattern for all 

 professional spermers for half a century. She returned to London in 

 1 790 with a full cargo of sperm products. The following year several 

 of the convict ships started whaling along the Australian coast, after 

 unloading their human cargoes. One Captain Thomas Melville took 

 four whales that year and saw such numbers his reports became a 

 little hysterical. Ships poured into the area and twenty returned to 

 London the following year with full holds. Despite the fact that it 

 took the whalers four months to reach Australia, and although the 

 East India Company still disallowed whaling east of the Cape of 

 Good Hope, activity increased annually. The enterprising Sam En- 

 derby, noting this, fitted out the Rattler and with what we must 



