62 WHALING 



them under able and experienced masters, left home early in 

 May for the North . There was a brief " southwesit' ' fishing near 

 Frobisher's Strait; then they went on past Davis Strait and 

 Baffin Bay, to Melville Bay. Thence they worked westward, 

 as best they might according to the state of the ice, to the en- 

 trance of Lancaster Sound where there was usually, in the 

 month of June, whaling a-plenty. In July they went farther up 

 the sound, perhaps as far as Prince Regent Inlet. Now and 

 then a whaler needed only a month or two more to be ready for 

 the return voyage, but more commonly they followed the 

 migrating whales south to Home Bay, sometimes even to the 

 Gulf of Cumberland, and the fleet as a whole reached Dundee 

 again early in November. Like the ArctiCy they were all 

 staunchly built, "doubled and fortified by the application of 

 timber and iron both inside and out." Particularly the bows 

 were protected by "angle irons" against the ice they had to buck 

 through. They were from three hundred to four hundred and 

 fifty tons burden and each carried a crew of about fifty. The 

 harpoon gun was in use by this time, though not on the steamer 

 itself, as it is used to-day: each boat — the Arctic had six — had 

 its own small harpoon gun, and hand harpoons and lances be- 

 sides. 



The Arctic's cargo that year was a remarkable one, and luck 

 was as uncertain then, apparently, as in sailing days. For in- 

 stance, in 1867 the Dundee whalers in Davis Strait caught ex- 

 actly two whales; the next year they caught seventy-nine. 



But all this was right whaling still. Some vessels combined 

 whaling and sealing and those that went on to Cumberland 

 Strait got white whales, but finners and other rorquals, being 

 strong and swift, had long eluded whalers, and were considered 

 of little value. The grapes were sour, anyway! 



The Norwegians had been whaling ever since whaling began, 

 and in 1864 a Norwegian named Svend Foyn invented the har- 

 poon gun, which was to revolutionize whaling. Of course this 

 first harpoon gun has been considerably altered as use has sug- 

 gested improvements, but in essentials it was much like that 



