30 WHALES 



Australia and Kerguelen Island, and their number became greatly 

 reduced. 



From 1846 onwards Sperm whaling went into a steep decline, again 

 not so much because Sperm Whales had become too scarce - their present 

 number is probably no smaller than it was in those days - but for a host 

 of economic reasons. The rapid development of the American cotton 

 industry was attracting capital and manpower, and then, in 1849, sailors 

 in San Francisco deserted in their hundreds to join the great gold rush. 

 Also, a great nvunber of ships were lost during the American Civil War. 

 Finally, in 1859, mineral oil was discovered in Pennsylvania and began 

 slowly but steadily to oust whale oil and spermaceti candles from the fuel 

 market. The real old salts stuck it out as long as they could, but by 1925, 

 when the John R. Manta and the Margarett returned to New Bedford for 

 the last time, the romantic epoch of Sperm Whale hunting, which to all 

 intents and purposes had come to an end in i860, was definitely over. 

 That epoch, so rich in profits and adventure, had yet been rather dis- 

 appointing from the scientific point of view. 



Even today we lack a really accurate description of the muscles and 

 internal organs of an animal of which specimens have been captured in 

 their hundreds of thousand over the centuries. The Sperm Whale still 

 holds a number of secrets that other animals have yielded up long ago. 

 The most valuable scientific heritage from that period consists of the many 

 old log-books now kept in the New Bedford Public Library and other New 

 England institutions. In 1935 Townsend made a thorough study of some 

 of the available material, from which at least some facts about the 

 geographic distribution of the species and about its migratory habits 

 emerged. 



As transport and our knowledge of human and animal anatomy 

 improved, biologists the world over paid increasing attention to stranded 

 whales. Occasionally a whale or a dolphin would be washed ashore dead 

 or alive, particularly when it entered shallow waters and was caught by 

 sandbanks or cliffs. \'an Deinse in his 1931 thesis and in later papers gave 

 a detailed account of all such strandings off the Dutch coast. During the 

 second half of the eighteenth century the great anatomist Petrus Camper 

 also did a great deal of work on stranded whales, van Breda supervised 

 the dissection of a Bottlenose Whale stranded off Zandvoort on the 24th 

 July, 1846, and Vrolik, the founder of the anatomical collection of the 

 University of Amsterdam, investigated a great many Cetacean organs. 

 In Belgium, van Beneden was responsible for the splendid collection of 

 skeletons, which form so important a part of the Brussels Museum of 

 Natural History; in France, Gervais and Delage; in Scotland, Struthers 

 and Turner ; in England, Murie ; in Sweden, Malm ; in Germany, Kükcnthal 



