372 Appendix A 



understood that the volume, variety, and value of the products pro- 

 duced today far exceed those derived from the boiled blubber of the 

 black right whales tryed-out by the Basques on the high seas. 



The actual volume of Dutch, British, and American whaling is similarly 

 hard to assess and still more difficult to demonstrate visually, and it must 

 be pointed out that the apparently slender Dutch effort probably repre- 

 sents a much greater investment and far greater monetary returns than 

 either of the others. The number of ships employed has usually been 

 used as a basic criterion, but a modern factory ship attended by a dozen 

 chasers and other craft takes whales at such a rate that the efforts of the 

 Yankee spermers, even when extending over three-year voyages, pale 

 into insignificance. There are about two hundred and fifty chasers work- 

 ing today, as against some eight hundred sailing ships in 1850, but they 

 take four times as many whales and produce from them several hundred 

 times the volume of products. 



Finally, it must be stressed that while the effects of war are shown on 

 the American and modern industries, they have been ignored with re- 

 spect to the British and Dutch. Those nations were just as radically 

 affected by their endless squabbles, both with each other and with out- 

 siders, and this produced a bewildering rise and fall in the size of their 

 whaling fleets and the annual accomplishments thereof, but these de- 

 tails were deliberately eliminated in order to present a simplified over- 

 all picture of the chronology of whaling during the last four hundred 

 years by the five leading operators and contestants — the Basques, Dutch, 

 British, Americans, and Norwegians. 



At the same time, it must not be overlooked that the French, Spanish, 

 Germans, and, to a lesser extent, the Danes and Portuguese were also 

 whaling throughout this period with varying degrees of industry, while 

 in other parts of the world all manner of maritime peoples were always 

 busy at small offshore whale-fishing efforts and stranded whales con- 

 tinued to represent a boon to almost all coastal peoples. 



