1 8 WHALES 



to the Arctic, but failed to find the North-East passage he had sought. 

 Three Dutchmen, Heemskerk, Bai'endsz and De Rijp, were equally 

 unsuccessful and had to spend the winter of 1596 on Novaya Zemlya. 

 However, those who survived this voyage returned with the news that the 

 bays in Novaya Zemlya, Spitsbergen and Jan Mayen Island were 

 teeming with whales. They had seen Biscayan Right Whales and also very 

 similar animals which did not venture very far beyond the ice, and which 

 had extraordinarily large heads with white or yellow spots on the chin and 

 throat, but which lacked the usual bonnet. The Norwegians had met this 

 animal much earlier, particularly off Iceland and the western coast of 

 Greenland, and had called it the Gronlands-Hval (Fig. 9). 



The Rorquals which are hunted nowadays, and which are distinguished 

 from Right Whales by having small dorsal fins, also occurred in the 

 Arctic Ocean, but they are so fast that they must have eluded primitive 

 rowing boats. They can break surface as much as half a mile from the 

 spot where they dive (or sound, as whalers call it) and do not float when 

 dead, but sink to the depths of the ocean (Fig. 9). 



Right Whales, on the other hand, are slow animals and usually do not 

 come to the surface at such long distances from the spot where they dive. 

 Moreover, their carcasses float on the surface and can be dragged to 

 the beach or alongside a ship where they can be flensed and robbed of 

 their precious yield. In addition, their whalebone is very long though of 

 comparatively poor quality - that of the Greenland Whale can reach 1 3 

 feet while that of the Rorquals is very much shorter. 



Reports about the abundance of whales in the Arctic caused a great 

 deal of excitement in Western Europe, and shipbuilders found that a 

 profitable new avenue was opening up to them. Since the Greenland 

 Whale is found mainly in the Arctic sea ice, expeditions required years of 

 careful preparation, and it took till 161 1 for Thomas Edge to succeed in 

 taking the first whaling ship to Spitsbergen. The first Dutch ship followed 

 in 1 61 2, and in*i6i4 the Noordse Compagnie, a kind of cartel as we might call 

 it today, was founded in Holland. 



The so-called 'Greenland whalers', who, by the way, went to Spits- 

 bergen,^ Novaya Zemlya and Jan Mayen Island rather than to Greenland 

 itself, were ships of 250-400 tons, 100-120 feet long and 22-29 ^^^^ wide, 

 and carried a crew of 30-50 men (some even double that number) 

 and 4-7 sloops. It cost roughly ;^i,200 to equip such a ship - quite a lot 

 of money for the time. But the profits, too, were considerable. A large 

 Greenland Whale yielded about i\ tons of whalebone, and whalebone 

 fetched as much as ^^2, 2 50 a ton when the market was firm. Apart from 

 that, each whale supplied some 25 tons of oil, so the capture of one whale 

 ^ Whalers refer to Spitsbergen as East Greenland. 



