20 WHALES 



would more than pay for the cost of the whole expedition. Of course, ships 

 also came back empty-handed or damaged, and some never returned at 

 all, but then other ships brought back the yield of as many as seventy-five 

 animals in one season. No wonder that there was keen competition among 

 sailors, and that such famous men as Admiral Michiel Adriaensz de 

 Ruyter learned navigation on Arctic whalers in their youth (1633 and 



1635)- 



Originally, whales were caught in the bays of Spitsbergen and of the 

 other islands and then taken ashore for flensing (Fig. 11). As early as 

 1 61 9 — the year in which they founded Batavia, the capital of their Far 

 Eastern colonial empire - the Dutch also founded Smeerenburg, a settle- 

 ment on Spitsbergen. In good summers, more than a thousand men were 

 left behind here to look after the large boilers (try-works) and the repair 

 dock. Later, when whales became scarcer in the bays, the men went 

 out to sea, capturing the animals with hand harpoons and finishing them 

 off with spears. The whales were then flensed alongside the boats. Since 

 there were no boilers at sea, the blubber was cut up into small pieces and 

 taken home in barrels. Holes were drilled into the bones to recover 

 precious bone oil as well. 



In the course of the seventeenth centuiy, the pace of Arctic whaling 

 increased by leaps and bounds. Whaling expeditions set out not only 

 from Britain and Holland but also from Denmark, from the German ports 

 of Hamburg, Bremen and Liibeck and finally from France, the latter 

 manned with Basque harpooners who had seen better days. In 1680 

 Holland had 260 whalers with a total crew of 14,000, and in 1697, 182 

 ships of various nationalities caught 1,888 whales off" Spitsbergen alone. 

 Every country had its own settlement in the Arctic, and the new industry 

 also brought prosperity to many a home port. In the eighteenth century 

 America, too, joined the hunt for Greenland Whales, not only in the Davis 

 Straits and Baffin Bay but also - albeit somewhat later and not in very 

 great numbers until the nineteenth century - in the Bering Straits and in 

 the Sea of Okhotsk. The Greenland Whale is found over the entire Arctic, 

 and until the end of the nineteenth century whalebone remained a 

 valuable commodity. In 1897 one pound of whalebone fetched four 

 dollars on the San Francisco market and, together with the oil, the profit 

 from a single Greenland Whale could be as much as ^^8,000. During the 

 1849 season whalebone to the tune of 2 million dollars was sold in 

 Honolulu alone. 



In 1720 European whalers, too, shifted their activities towards the 

 Davis Straits and Baffin Bay, to look for new hunting grounds. 



Even so, by the eighteenth century the Greenland Whale was still far 

 from extinct, and the decline of, for instance, the Dutch whaling industry 



