84 A History of the American Whale Fishery. 
darting gun was invented about 1880, expressely to meet 
the needs of this fishery, by Captain Eben Pierce and 
Mr. Patrick Cunningham of New Bedford.” The gun 
consists of.a stockless barrel, of gun metal, attached to a 
regular wooden harpoon pole. A harpoon with whale 
line attached fits loosely in lugs on the side of the barrel. 
The apparatus is loaded with a charge of powder and a 
bomb lance and then the whole is darted at the whale. 
The harpoon entering the whale’s body springs the trigger, 
which appears as a long wire rod projecting beyond the 
muzzle of the gun, and the bomb lance is automatically 
discharged into the whale. Under ordinary circum- 
stances the whale is killed or severely wounded by the 
explosion of the bomb, at the same time that it is fastened 
to the boat by the harpoon and line. In this way whales 
are rarely lost. Were it not for the darting gun, however, 
whaling could not be successfully carried on amid the 
Arctic ice packs, now the most important whaling 
ground for the American fleet." 
The most destructive weapon ever used in killing whales 
is the whaling rocket, invented about 1880. It consists 
of a large rocket, harpoon and bomb lance, having a total 
weight of about eighteen or twenty pounds. It was 
intended to be fired from the deck of the whaling vessel 
itself, thus doing away with the necessity of pursuit in 
boats. But as far as records go the rocket does not 
appear to have come into very general use. 
Aside from these regular whaling implements, nets, 
electricity and poisoned harpoons have been advanced as 
experiments in capturing whales. Scoresby in writing of 
the methods of capture at the opening of the seventeenth 
century says,” ‘The Dutch inform us that the English 
made use of nets made of strong ropes for the purpose.” 
11 Goode, p. 254. 
18 For a more detailed discussion of this gun see Goode, p. 254, or 
Scammon, p. 228. 
1° Scoresby, p. 173. t 
