RORQUALS OR FIN WHALES 237 



passes several times round the drum of a winch and through 

 a system of blocks attached to springs, thus lessening the 

 chances of the line parting and the whale getting away. 



The Rorqual Fishery was started on the Finmark coast of 

 Norway in the 'sixties of last century, and since then the 

 practical operation of the industry has been so extensively in 

 the hands of the Norwegians that even at the present time the 

 position is comparable to that existing in the beginning of the 

 seventeenth century when, although Dutch, French and 

 English were concerned in the Greenland fishery, the experience 

 and skill was a monopoly of the Basque whaling men. The 

 Finmark fishery was the first of many to be started in the 

 northern hemisphere. Before the end of the nineteenth 

 century whaling stations had been built in Iceland, the Faroe 

 Islands, Scotland, Western Ireland, Labrador, British Columbia. 

 Japan and Korea. Blue, Sei and Finner Whales were pursued, 

 and in addition the Humpback, an inshore frequenting species, 

 was often the first to be commercially exploited. The same 

 sequence of events, noted in connection with the Greenland 

 and Atlantic Right Whale fishery, occurred in the new Rorqual 

 fishery. Abundance in the beginning was succeeded as a 

 result of over-fishing by a reduction of the stock of whales, so 

 that it became unprofitable to hunt them and the whalers had 

 to go further afield to new areas, eventually finding their way 

 into the southern hemisphere. 



In 1892 a whaling expedition from Dundee, carrying the 

 Scottish Antarctic explorer, Bruce, sailed to the Weddell Sea 

 in search of Right Whales. In this it was unsuccessful, 

 but when Bruce returned he tried to interest business men in 

 Edinburgh in the possibility of developing an Antarctic 

 Rorqual fishery. He failed to get any support for his intended 

 project, but the Norwegian, Captain C. A. Larsen, who had 

 visited the South Shetlands in 1893-94, and again in 1901, was 

 more fortunate, for on his return from the south to Buenos 

 Aires he founded the first company to operate in Antarctic 

 waters— the Compania Argentina de Pesca, with its whaling 

 station at Grytviken, South Georgia. 



South Georgia has much to recommend it as a base for 

 whaling operations. There are many long fjords on the north- 

 east coast which make good natural harbours, and it is ice-free 



