INTRODUCTION xi 



With the exception of seal-hunting in the 

 Gulf of St. Lawrence and in the neighbour- 

 hood of Jan Mayen, where it is still undertaken 

 by a few American and Norwegian vessels 

 with fairly remunerative results, the hunting of 

 amphibious animals is now only undertaken 

 by small sealers from Tromso and Hammerfest, 

 which, with considerable difficulty, contrive to 

 collect a cargo of two or three hundred skins 

 in a season. 



As regards whale-hunting, apart from three 

 or four Dundee whalers commanded by ener- 

 getic and experienced men, such as Captain 

 Robertson, whom I had the pleasure of meeting 

 in the Greenland ice-fields, who still find the 

 industry a fairly lucrative one, it may be said 

 to be quite extinct. 



In a short while baleinopteres, which are 

 still hunted around the Faroes and off Spitz- 

 bergen, but are rapidly being destroyed by the 

 inventions of modern fishers, will, too, have 

 disappeared. 



Re-reading, in the course of my expeditions, 

 the accounts which remain to us of ancient 

 whaling, I was astonished that that splendid 

 period of hunting, which, inaugurated by our 

 own Basque sailors, lasted for nearly three 

 centuries, should have been permitted to pass 



