THE SOUTH SEAS AND THE NORWEGIANS 



NOT wholly unlike the threescore years and ten permitted 

 to man, with its tentative beginnings, its growth and 

 development, its period of full power and the gradual decline to 

 its end, is the whaling life of a nation. The Basques were 

 probably the beginners and later the leaders. With the decline 

 of Basque whaling, Dutch whaling rose to its predominance; 

 at the very moment when Dutch whaling was subsidized, like 

 an old man reduced to a pension, the English whalers from Hull 

 were at the height of their glory. Similarly it was quite evi- 

 dent to the English, early in the 19th Century, that their 

 "Greenland fishery" was doomed — their so-called Southern 

 fishery replaced it only for a relatively short period; and this 

 very time marks the years of prosperity for the Scottish fleets 

 and for American whaling. 



American whaling is, for Americans at least, a story — several 

 stories — in itself. It had its influence, however, on other 

 whaling, for in 1712 a Nantucket whaleman, blown to sea by a 

 strong northerly wind, made the first recorded capture of a 

 sperm whale. Immediately and inevitably the superiority of 

 sperm oil over other whale oil was discovered, small vessels, 

 which undoubtedly seemed large to their builders and to their 

 masters, were fitted out for whaling in ''the deep," and in the 

 course of time the great sperm whaling developed. 



This could not, of course, long be monopolized by American 

 vessels. Yet it was not until 1775 that the British made any 

 attempt at it. Then it was that, in order ''to starve New Eng- 

 land," Parliament passed the famous act restricting colonial 

 trade to British ports and placed an embargo on "fishing on the 

 Banks of Newfoundland or on any other part of the North 



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