22 



WHALES 



Figure 1 1. Try-works on Jan Alayen Island. After a painting by C. W. de Alan, i6jg. 



{Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. ) 



at the beginning of that century must be attributed to quite different 

 causes: wars, occupation, keener British competition, and new poHtical 

 and economic factors. But by the nineteenth century it was too late, for 

 when sporadic Dutch expeditions set out for the Arctic they had httle 

 success. The last Dutch ship to catch a Greenland Whale was the Dirkje 

 Adema in i860. From 1 870-1 872 Captain C. J. Bottemanne hunted 

 Rorquals off Iceland, with equally poor results. 



But it was not the Dutch who were responsible for so decimating the 

 Greenland and Biscayan Whales that nowadays they have become a rare 

 and highly protected species. This dubious honour is due to Britain, which 

 unlike all other countries continued to hunt the animals during the entire 

 nineteenth century with better and better equipment, penetrating the ice 

 more and more deeply for longer and longer periods and causing whole- 

 sale slaughter even among very young animals. At the beginning of the 

 twentieth century this game, too, was no longer worth the candle. In 

 1910 ten ships from Dundee still managed to catch eighteen whales, 

 but by 1 91 2 the one ship to leave Dundee returned empty-handed. At the 

 moment the number of Greenland Whales is growing again. They are 

 still absent or at least very rare in European waters but put in a regular 

 appearance in Hudson Bay, Eclipse Sound and Lancaster Sound, as well 

 as in the Bering Sea. Now and then, Eskimos and the inhabitants of eastern 

 Siberia manage to capture an odd specimen; they are allowed to do so 

 since the local population is exempt from international restrictions. 

 Siberian sledge-runners continue to be made of whalebone to this day, 

 though clock-springs are now increasingly being manufactured of other 

 materials. 



