278 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



schooner transoms and bows, lengthening the spars, and adding ever 

 more fore-and-aft canvas. Some of these ships, though wonderful 

 sea boats, were extraordinarily ugly, with spars pulled far forward 

 of the upright, and most ungracefully straight hnes. One can some- 

 times hardly believe that they could have been as depicted in con- 

 temporary drawings and paintings, and perhaps they were not, just 

 as one can likewise hardly beheve that some of those ladies painted 

 by the old masters could have been the mistresses of any man, let 

 alone French kings. Nonetheless, the changes wrought in the ships 

 certainly increased both their efficiency and the speed with which 

 they went to and returned from the whahng grounds. Instead of 

 taking half the season to get there and back, they finally made the 

 passage home so rapidly that they were delivering fresh blubber to 

 the try- works in Scotland. Still, the industry was just holding its 

 own when a number of things took place that at first gave it a 

 great boost, but finally brought about its collapse. 



The first of these developments is seldom mentioned, and we 

 don't know exactly when it began or when it started to affect the 

 industry. This was the use of whale meat and bones for the manu- 

 facture of fertilizer. The first mention of this most important proc- 

 ess appears in an advertisement in a London newspaper as early as 

 1 81 2, wherein the resultant product is called "manure," but no offi- 

 cial records of this manufactory appear to have been compiled until 

 nearly forty years later, though the practice became of ever-increas- 

 ing importance. The second event was the application of artificial 

 power to ships, in the form of the steam engine. 



Steam power had been known to the Greek-Egyptians of Alex- 

 andria in the early Christian Era and had been used by them to run 

 pumps. The Arab scientists of the Middle Ages made it known to 

 European savants in the form of certain toys, but it was not until 

 the Englishmen Savery, Papin, Newcomen, and especially Watt ex- 

 perimented with it in the early 1700s that it became known as a 

 usable source of power. It was first applied in a mobile form by Rich- 

 ard Trevithick in 1 800, in a carriage, and then by Stephenson in his 

 "Rocket," which, being made to run on two tracks, constituted the 

 first railroad. Two years later one WilHam Symington built a steam- 

 propelled tug named the Charlotte Dundas for use in the Forth to 

 Clyde canal in Scotland, but it was not till 1 8 1 1 that a passenger 



