The Whalers : 207 



ing assistance. One of the whalers, the Alfred, had come into the port 

 of Hull and reported that eleven ships had been beset (that is, fro- 

 zen in) at Davis Straits by a sudden and early descent of v\^inter. The 

 600 men aboard were caught with little chance of escaping. The value 

 represented by these ships and the products they had aboard was 

 approximately ^T 60,000. It was no new thing for a few ships to be 

 caught in the ice. Almost every year some ships suffered in this fash- 

 ion but eleven ships was a number large enough to create local and 

 even national interest. James Clarke Ross, a distinguished Arctic 

 explorer, volunteered his services and, with the help of the admiralty 

 and a popular subscription, attempted to carry out a rescue operation. 

 He became commander of a vessel from Whitby named the Cove. 

 He encountered extremely bad weather and his attempts at rescue 

 were not notably successful. Some ships were wrecked but fortunately 

 a number of them drifted out of the ice and were able to make their 

 way to England. 



As a sort of footnote, the record also shows that in the year 1836 

 six whalers were again caught in the ice. This time there were only 

 300 men aboard and this time the admiralty declined to fit out a relief 

 expedition. Probably, again, some of these vessels eventually drifted 

 out of the ice and returned home and, probably also, some of them 

 were abandoned. 



It was not simply the Greenland waters that brought accident and 

 disaster to whalers, nor was the hazard of being frozen in the ice 

 restricted to Atlantic waters. Ships from the United States Atlantic 

 coast were the pioneers in developing the Arctic fisheries in the Ber- 

 ing Sea and the Bering Straits and along the Arctic shores of Alaska. 

 In 1876 twenty vessels were abandoned and destroyed in the Arctic 

 ice but the greatest catastrophe of all, judged by loss of vessels, came 

 in 1 87 1 when a fleet of thirty-two vessels was caught in the ice and 

 had to be abandoned. The officers, crews, wives and famiHes aboard 

 who were shipwrecked and stranded numbered over 1,200 people. 

 While the big whaling ships could not be moved, it was fortunate that 

 the whaleboats were able to find a way around or over the ice. Fortu- 

 nately also, seven American ships had remained clear of the ice a little 

 less than 100 miles distant. After some days of traveling through high 

 winds and high seas, the whaleboats managed to reach the ice-free 

 ships, and out of the 1,200 persons, not a man, woman or child was 

 lost. 



It is worth noting where the ships that were lost and abandoned in 

 the ice sailed from, for it provides a little picture of this part of the 



