Afternoon by the Ice iji 



The innate duality of the second British whaling effort becomes 

 clear only after one has followed either one or the other of its as- 

 pects from its beginning to its specialized zenith, and thence through 

 its declining phases to its ultimate end. We have done just this and 

 seen that, once the possibilities of a "southern fishery" were realized, 

 a special fleet was built to exploit it. The owners of this fleet, how- 

 ever, were in many cases the same merchant traders who built the 

 whalers which engaged in the "northern fishery," so that both their 

 records and official statistics tend to cloud the issue rather than to 

 reveal the complete dissimilarity of the two enterprises. From the 

 turn of the eighteenth century the British industry was split into two 

 quite separate projects employing quite different techniques. 



The southern fishery came to a rather abrupt end in the middle of 

 the nineteenth century. By this time the third phase of American 

 whaling was going full blast and followed its quite separate and indi- 

 vidualistic history to its gentle end in the present century. To com- 

 plete the picture, we must now turn back to a point some fifty years 

 before the beginning of the nineteenth century and investigate the 

 other part of the second phase of British whaling — that in the north 

 — and, in turn, follow it to its conclusion. This is a very important 

 period in the history of whaling as a whole, for without a proper 

 understanding of its progress, the origins of the modern industry 

 will be quite incomprehensible. This phase began about 1760. 



In that year there were just forty British vessels engaged in whal- 

 ing, despite the enhanced bounty. All were registered in England, 

 and all were engaged in the Arctic, all but a few in the Greenland 

 seas (see map page 163). It was in that year, moreover, that the first 

 tentative gesture towards participation in the business was made by 

 a people who were, in one way, new in the field, but were, in an- 

 other way, virtually the originators of the whole business — at least 

 in western Europe. These were the Scots. 



The Scots' whaling fleet was never large and their activities never 

 became widely known, but their influence was very great and it was 

 these people who eventually shifted the whole industry into the high 

 gear that made modern whaling possible. What is more, they made 

 a very considerable success of the enterprise, and derived from it 

 much higher comparative profits more consistently than did either 

 the English or even — when we come to compare the end results of 



