Evening in the North 295 



on land, but its most obvious use was manifestly in water, where 

 even a dead prize may sink beyond reach before it can be retrieved. 

 We have traced the history of man's pursuit of the whale back to 

 the inhabitants of Norway about the year 8000 b.c, when offshore 

 whaling was definitely in progress there. Also, as we have already 

 noted, peculiarly large harpoons were employed by certain mari- 

 time peoples of the Iberian peninsula just twice as long ago, in 

 16,000 B.C. But these were still not by any means the oldest harpoons. 



This tool has one of the most ancient and venerable histories, and 

 yet it changed Httle throughout twenty millennia. Even the coming 

 of the age of metals did not alter its basic pattern, though some early 

 Iron Age harpoons had three rows of tines arranged at 120-degree 

 intervals around the shaft, and for special purposes these were re- 

 curved so that the tips of the tines ran parallel to that shaft. The 

 harpoon was originally a throwing device, but in rather early times 

 men conceived the idea of shooting the thing mechanically. Pre- 

 sumably, fish-harpoons had been shot with bows for countless thou- 

 sands of years just as they are today by many riverine tribesmen in 

 the Amazon and other areas. The first time, however, that some- 

 thing stronger than a human arm was needed to shoot a harpoon was 

 probably when the Norse tried to attack the larger whales, either 

 from land — as we noted them doing in the fjords during the Dark 

 Ages — or from ships large enough to carry the machines necessary. 

 Thus, it was the Norse who invented the "harpoon gun." The idea 

 of a gun, however, is, usually, inseparably associated in our minds 

 with an explosive charge, while the device used by the Norse was 

 simply a vast bow, catapult, or ballista. 



Our earliest ancestors, equipped with harpoons, while perambu- 

 lating the beaches must have conceived the notion of hunting fish 

 offshore, and, along with them, porpoises, dolphins, and finally the 

 larger whales. This idea persisted throughout the ages, and one of 

 maritime man's primary objectives has always been to devise ever 

 more efficient methods of doing this. Some of the results of his en- 

 deavors were rather extreme and economically very silly — notably, 

 sailing wooden ships into the arctic ice and then pursuing hundred- 

 ton monsters in cockleshell boats with tiny, hand-thrown harpoons 

 no more efficient than those used by Stone Age man twenty thou- 

 sand years before. Thus, the next really great step forward in whal- 



