6 whalebone: its production and utilization. 



, yield and values of avhalebone. 



In the early days of the whale fishery the valuable qualities of 

 whalebone were not well known, and comparatively little of the prod- 

 uct was saved. The first importation into England is supj)Osed to 

 have been in the year 1594, when a quantity was picked up among 

 the wreckage of a Biscayan ship. It is stated that from 1715 to 1721 

 at least £100,000 per annum was paid to the Dutch for whalebone, the 

 price approximating £400 per ton." The price advanced at times to 

 £700 per ton^, but toAvard the end of the eighteenth century it de- 

 creased to £50 per ton. 



In the beginning of the nineteenth century whalebone sold so cheap 

 that few vessels brought any great quantity home, it being more 

 profitable to fill the hold with oil. During the first two decades of the 

 nineteenth centuiy the annual receipts in port from the American fish- 

 eries did not exceed 50,000 pounds, worth about 10 cent* per pound. 

 The demand then increased, raising the price to 25 cents in 1829, when 

 the whalemen brought in over half a million pounds. Owing to a 

 decrease in value to 13 cents, the amount secured decreased to 266,432 

 pounds in 1833. Based on the product of oil, it seems probable that had 

 all the whalebone been saved the total yield during that year would 

 have exceeded 1,500,000 pounds, worth, at the j) resent market price, 

 about $9,000,000. For ten years following 1833 the price fluctuated 

 between 13 and 30 cents, and the product ranged to upward of 

 2,500,000 pounds. From 1844 to the outbreak of the civil war the 

 output averaged about 2,800,000 pounds annually, the greatest for one 

 year being 5,692,300 pounds in 1853, and the price gradually increased 

 to $1 per pound. Since 1860 there has been a large decrease in the 

 wfialebone output; in 1862, for the first time 'for many years, it 

 fell below 1,000,000 pounds, and only once since then has it exceeded 

 that amount, viz, in 1867, when it was 1,001,397 pounds. From that 

 time to 1902 it ranged between 100,000 and 900,000 pounds, and in 

 1903 the yield was only 74,850 jjounds, the smallest since early in' 

 the nineteenth century. Of the whalebone taken by American ves- 

 sels during the last twent3'-five years, iliore than 90 per cent has been 

 secured by the North Pacific fleet, mostly in the Arctic Ocean, and 

 the remainder mainly by the Hudson Bay and the Atlantic Ocean 

 fleets. The total product landed from the American fisheries during 

 the nineteenth century doubtless exceeded 90,000,000 pounds, worth 

 about $450,000,000 at the present market valuation. 



The reduction in the 3'ield of whalebone has been largely counter- 

 balanced by increase in the value per pound. Indeed the rise in price 

 during the last thirty years has been remarkable. In 1871 the average 



o Henry Elking, A view of the Greenland trade and whale fishery, with the 

 national and private advantage thereof, p. 65. (London, 1722, 8°.) 



bDavid Macpherson. Annals of commerce, manufactures, fisheries and naviga- 

 tion, vol. III. p. 871. (London, 1805, 4°.) 



