58 WHALING 



American coast." In the same year, British ships were sent 

 out, vessels of about a hundred tons, but with very little success, 

 though they went into much the same waters frequented so 

 successfully by American vessels. This "Southern fishery" 

 was, of course, a matter of experiment for some years. The 

 first vessels went to South Greenland, the Brazilian coast, the 

 Falkland Islands, and the Gulf of Guinea; later they braved 

 *'the stormy waters of the Horn," and cruised in the Pacific. 

 But it was all on chance; they knew little or nothing of the 

 various sperm-whaling grounds or how, or why, those grounds 

 were fruitful at certain seasons and barren at others. In 

 1792, London merchants sent out the sloop Rattler, under 

 Colnett, on an expedition round Cape Horn, to find out these 

 all-important facts. The Rattler carried an absurd little 

 scratch crew, few of whom knew anything about whaling, and 

 though, off Mocha Island, they found the sea fairly alive with 

 whales, they succeeded in taking only six, four of which they got 

 alongside, and of these four they actually saved two. We are 

 not told how many they chased. Cruising thereabouts for 

 several days, they saw great numbers of whales and managed to 

 kill two, but lost one of these before reaching the ship. They 

 had better luck later, as the crew became more practised, and 

 they took four whales near Quibo and five at the Galapagos. 

 As a whaling voyage, the cruise of the Rattler was not a great 

 success, but they cruised widely and surveyed much and made 

 many records which were of use to whalers who came after them. 

 Such were the early days of the ''Southern fishery." Whatever 

 their luck in actually taking whales, these first adventurers told 

 of seeing so many of them that by the early 19th Century a 

 goodly number of English ships were engaged in the indusky, 

 and in 1834, over a hundred of them were reported at sea. 



"The Southern Fishery," says Enderby, son of one of the 

 wealthiest and most influential men ever concerned in English 

 whaling, "may be said to embrace, with the exception of the 

 seas constituting what is properly called the Northern or 

 Greenland Fishery, the whole expanse of ocean." They called 

 it Southern because the whalers first went South, usually to 



