24 WHALES 



to Europe. Thus, it was no novelty when, in 1952, two Fin Whales, 

 pickled in formalin, travelled through western Europe - the one, Jonas, by 

 ship, and the other, Miss Haroy, in a 65-foot railway car specially con- 

 structed to carry her weight of more than fifty tons. Similar sights could 

 have been seen in 1892 and in 1903, and even dvnüng the eighteenth 

 century. According to J. Bicker Raye's reliable account of daily life in 

 Amsterdam, 'Air Waterman's Greenland whaler brought back an 

 eighteen-foot-long whale on the 30th September i 736, the whale being 

 displayed full length in pickle'. Judging by its size, the animal must have 

 been a very young Greenland Whale, for this is their length at birth. 



It seems odd that the great English anatomist John Hunter (1787) 

 complained of difficulties in obtaining whale material, when there are 

 so many excellent etchings of whaling conditions at that time. Hunter, 

 by the way, was the first to give good and accurate descriptions of the big 

 whales and particularly of their internal structure. Though the British 

 had almost completely eradicated the Greenland Whale by the nine- 

 teenth century, they had at least made sure of providing posterity with an 

 excellent description of this important animal. Supplementing the work 

 of Hunter, William Scoresby published his Account of the Arctic Region 

 (1820) in Edinburgh. Scoresby, the son of a whaling captain, made his 

 first journey to the Arctic in his father's company when he was only ten 

 years old. He then went back to school, and later studied biology and 

 anatomy at Edinburgh University. In 1810, when he took command of 

 his father's Resolution, he was the first academic whaling expert to sail a 

 ship, and I believe that this feat has not often been repeated since. I might 

 add that his schooling did no harm to his commercial success, for in 

 1820, the year in which his book appeared, he brought back to Liverpool 

 the biggest of all Greenland catches. Yet another scientist to whom we owe 

 much of our knowledge of the Greenland Whale is the Danish biologist, 

 Eschricht, who published his accounts in about the middle of last century. 



So far we have discussed whaling in Evn'ope and the neighbouring seas, 

 but elsewhere, too, the whale was given little peace. The Greenland 

 Eskimos and the Indians of the American West Coast probably began 

 whale-hunting early in the sixteenth century. It seems likely that they 

 originally picked up the trade from the Basques, but they very quickly 

 developed a method of their own. This method was either an adaptation 

 of Basque techniques to the special conditions prevailing off the American 

 East Coast, or else the original contribution of the Indians of Cape Flattery 

 (which is now in the state of Washington) . Twenty to thirty small hand 

 harpoons or spears are thrust simultaneously into the whale's body. Each 

 harpoon is attached to a block of wood or an inflated sealskin which 

 floats above the water and thus keeps the animal buoyant. Moreover, the 



