SOUTH SEAS AND THE NORWEGIANS 63 



now in ulse. It was mounted on a swivel and it fired at from 

 twenty-five to fifty yards, with four hundred fathoms of strong 

 rope attached to the harpoon. With this harpoon was a little 

 glass phial of sulphuric acid; this phial broke within the whale — 

 crushed by the turning barbs — the sulphuric acid escaped, and 

 the bomb exploded. It is easy to see that this must make of 

 whaling another matter altogether. Even the finner, "the 

 greyhound oi the sea," hadn't a chance left. It was soon evi- 

 dent that the day of long cruises on the open sea was done; 

 stout little steamers of about thirty tons and as many horse- 

 power were built to hunt whales near shore and tow them in to a 

 factory for flensing and trying out. They carried eight or ten 

 men for an all-day or an overnight trip, and must have seemed a 

 joke to old-fashioned whalemen. But the joke was on the 

 older whalers, for these little vessels, like the harpoon guns 

 mounted on their bows, though they were much improved 

 in the years that followed, were — again like the guns — the 

 modek for all their kind in use to-day. And there are virtually 

 no big whalers now. 



Thus, with the little steamer and the harpoon gun and their 

 possibilities for wholesale slaughter, a new shore whaling de- 

 veloped. The Norwegians began it in their own Varanger 

 Fjords and were amazingly successful. New companies were 

 formed, in haste to get this new wealth, and before long, about 

 1881, the industry began to spread to Finmark and Tromso, 

 and to Iceland, and then to the northernmost islands off the 

 Scottish coast. In all these waters humpbacks, blue, and sei 

 whales, and finners were taken in great numbers. 



At the same time the grindval or pilot whale was hunted, 

 and had long been hunted, by the people of the Faroe Islands, 

 in a method quite different from what we think of as orthodox 

 whaling. This whale, sometimes called the caa'ing whale, and 

 most commonly known to American whalers as the blackfish, is, 

 excepting the killer, the largest of the porpoises, and sometimes 

 as much as twenty-four feet long. His names are suggestive 

 for he follows his leader, or ''pilot," in guileless trust, and thus 

 great kerds can be driven like silly sheep— hence the Scotch 



