64 WHALING 



vernacular name, ''caa'ing,'* which means ''driving/' whale. 

 In the Faroes he is known as "Grindehvar' — a herd of them as 

 "grind" — meaning ''lattice work." This is because of the way 

 of capture: when a school is sighted, the entire village takes to 

 small boats and forming a half circle on the outer edge of the 

 herd, drives them, slowly at first but with increasing speed, into 

 some bay or fjord. The boats close in upon them at the mouth 

 of this fjord and form a lattice work three rows deep; so that if 

 the whales suddenly turn and beat for open sea they may 

 promptly and surely be driven back with oars and stones. The 

 rest is obvious: when they reach shoal water, men are waiting 

 for them with spears and knives and it is only a matter of time 

 before the whole herd is slaughtered. This method of whaling 

 was practised in the Faroes long ago and is practised there 

 to-day with very little variation. It is community whaling, per- 

 haps the only true community whaling of this day and genera- 

 tion: the sheriff divides the kill among the inhabitants, and his 

 word is final. In the 19th Century about a thousand of these 

 beasts were killed annually in the islands, though at Hvalfjord, 

 Iceland, there was once a single record catch of eleven hundred 

 grind taken in this way. 



In the Arctic a similar method was used against the white 

 whale, beluga, whose snow-white skin is valuable as "porpoise 

 hide." There, nets were used in the final capture. And in New 

 Zealand the humpback is sometimes so caught, in wire nets. 



Still another whale became known to commerce when, in 1881, 

 a Norwegian vessel captured thirty-one, and the Scottish vessel 

 Eclipse captured twenty, bottlenose whales. In 1884 nine 

 vessels, one of them a steamer, brought in two hundred and 

 eleven bottlenoses; by 1891, seventy Norwegian vessels were 

 after the superior oil that he yields, and, for a time, two 

 thousand of the beasts were killed annually. But the bottle- 

 nose is not a numerous species, and such wholesale destruction 

 did not — could not — last long. It was increasingly difficult, 

 too, to get men for this sort of whaling, for it was wild work and 

 extraordinarily dangerous. When a bottlenose is struck he 

 usually dives straight down at terrific speed and five thousand 



