Evening in the North 303 



Faeroes in 1892, on the Outer Hebrides in 1895, and in the New 

 World on the shores of Newfoundland in 1897. In 1896, 2081 whales 

 were taken, and there were twenty-five chasers working out of Fin- 

 mark and eighteen out of Icelandic stations. The following year there 

 were twenty-five at the former and twenty-three at the latter. 



The turn of the century initiated great changes in the industry 

 and ushered in the golden age of Norwegian shore-based whaling, 

 which reached its zenith in 19 10. It began with serious and extraordi- 

 narily stupid troubles at home. Man is still virtually an uneducated, 

 though presumably a thinking, creature, and so uninformed is he on 

 some occasions that it becomes hard to beheve he thinks at all. Mis- 

 information is rife everywhere, but among specialized groups it 

 sometimes tends to become a mania, and very often this centers upon 

 the very matters in which those groups specialize. Fishermen are not 

 by any means the worst offenders in this respect, but they can be 

 very averse to change, and the Norwegians as a whole are a notably 

 stubborn people. Sometime during the rise of latter-day whaling, 

 Norwegian fisherfolk gained the impression that the offshore pursuit 

 of rorquals drove migrating fish away from their coasts. This entirely 

 false notion slowly became an obsession, supported by many quite 

 erroneous beliefs and dehberately fostered by irrelevant traditions. 

 A moment of reflection would have demonstrated to anyone, and 

 particularly to the fishermen themselves, that since the whales ate 

 either the fish or the food of the fish, or both, their eUmination could 

 only increase the number of fish. Nonetheless, the clamor became so 

 great that it erupted in serious riots at Mehavn, and these in turn 

 prompted the Norwegian Government in 1904 to ban the taking or 

 landing of whales off or on the coast. 



Instead of retarding the whaling, however, this action spurred its 

 expansion because the companies promptly built stations on foreign 

 shores, notably the Shetland Islands, Iceland, the Hebrides, and later 

 on the west coast of Ireland, and even on Spitsbergen. More stations 

 were built on Newfoundland, and .seasonal ones on Greenland. This 

 movement also resulted in some finite effort being made towards a 

 southern fishery, and in the following year, 1905, one Captain Carl 

 Anton Larsen organized the Compania Argentina de Pesca in Buenos 

 Aires to exploit the sea-countries south of Cape Horn by means of 

 chasers working out of the islands of South Georgia. In the same 



