236 WHALES AND DOLPHINS 



THE RORQUAL FISHERY. 



The history of the whaling industry up to the present time 

 would in itself fill a volume, so that only some of its salient 

 features can be mentioned here. Undoubtedly the chief factor 

 leading to the inception of modern whaling was the perfecting 

 of the harpoon gun by the Norwegian, Svend Foyn, in 1865. 

 He was not the originator of the idea of using a gun of some 

 sort to slaughter whales, because more than a century before 

 a portable harpoon gun had been tried ; William Scoresby 

 also took a harpoon gun with him on his whaling voyages at 

 the beginning of the nineteenth century. But it was Svend 

 Foyn's gun, used from the bows of a small steam vessel, 

 which made pursuit of the whales belonging to the Rorqual 

 family a practicable undertaking. Their size, speed and lack 

 of buoyancy when killed had caused the Rorquals to be 

 neglected by the earlier whalers using hand harpoons and 

 hunting from small boats ; also the poor quality of their 

 baleen compared with that of the Right Whales made them 

 less attractive prizes when whalebone was a valuable 

 commodity and prices for it were high. The modern harpoon 

 gun is an exceedingly effective weapon for the destruction of 

 the great Cetaceans. It has a bore of 3^ inches, and takes a 

 6-foot long iron harpoon with pointed and barbed tip which 

 projects from the muzzle. The harpoon weighs upwards of 

 a hundredweight, and the cast-iron point is charged with 

 gunpowder, which is timed to explode a few seconds after the 

 harpoon is fired, so that the iron fragments, flying in all 

 directions within the animal's body, add greatly to the lethal 

 effectiveness. The barbs are hinged and splay out to a wide 

 angle after the harpoon pierces the body, so that the weapon 

 is firmly secured and will not draw out when strain is put on 

 the harpoon line. The line consists of two sections, a thinner 

 shorter " foregoer " of Italian hemp, which is coiled on a 

 platform immediately below the gun, the one end of it attached 

 to the harpoon and the other to the second, much thicker, longer 

 rope, of which there may be as much as half a mile coiled in bins 

 below deck. The foregoer runs out when the harpoon is 

 fired, and the strain of the whale's struggles and of the pitching 

 ship is taken on the thicker rope which, before going outboard, 



