16 THE WHALEBONE WHALES OF THE WESTERN NOKTH ATLANTIC. 



Edward Haies, in his account of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's voyage to Newfound- 

 land in 1583, includes among the "commodities" of the island "abundance of 

 whales," " for which also," he writes, " is a very great trade in ye bayes of Placentia 

 and Grand bay, where is made Trane oyles of the whale." ' 



Toward the close of the century, in 1594, the ship Grace of Bristoll made a 

 trip to the Gulf of St. Lawrence for whales and reported finding some 700 or 800 

 pieces of whalebone in two large Basque whaling vessels which had been wrecked in 

 St. George's Bay, Newfoundland. The account, in Hakluyt's Voyages, is as follows : 



[1594. VOYAGE OF THE " GRACE OF BRISTOLL" TO THE BAY OF ST. LAWRENCE.] 



"In this bay of Saint George [Newfoundland, May, 1594] we found the 

 wrackes of 2 great Biskaine ships, which had bene cast away three yeres before : 

 where we had some seven or eight hundred whale finnes, and some yrou bolts and 

 chains of their mayne shrouds & fore shroudes : al their traine [oil] was beaten out 

 with the weather but the caske remained still. Some part of the commodities were 

 spoiled by tumbling downe of the cliffs of the hils, which covered part of the caske, 

 and greater part of those whale finnes, which we understood to be there by foure 

 Spaniards which escaped & were brought to S. John de Luz. . . . 



"Then being enformed, that the Whales which are deadly wounded in the 

 grand Baye [near the Strait of Belle Isle], and yet escape the fisher for a time, are 

 woont usually to shoot themselves on shore on the Isle of Assumption, or Natisco- 

 tec, which lieth in the very mouth of the great liver that runneth up to Canada, 

 we shaped our course over to that long Isle of Natiscotec. 



" And after wee had searched two dayes and a night for the whales which were 

 wounded which we hoped to have found there, and missed of our purpose we 

 returned backe to the Southwarde." ' 



In 1594 or 1595, Robert Dudley made a voyage to the West Indies, returning 

 along the coast of the United States and Canada. On April 11, 1595, the following 

 was recorded : 



" After wee weare past the meridian of the Berrnudes our courses brought us 

 not far from the cost of Labradore or Nova Francia, which wee knew by the great 

 aboundance of whalles." 3 



Lescarbot, who took part in the establishment of the French colonies in Acadia 

 and Port Royal in 1605, published in 1609 a history of the region, in the course of 

 which he describes the whale fishery in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, though he does 

 not describe the whale itself. This, however, was doubtless the Right whale. He 



remarks : 



[1609. LESCARBOT'S NARRATIVE.] 



" I leaue the maner of taking of her [Leviathan], described by Oppian and 8. 

 Basil for to come to our French-men, and chiefely the Basques, who doe goe euery 



1 HAK.LUYT, R., The Principal Navigations of the English Nation, 1589, p. 689. 



* Op. fit., 3, 1600, p. 194. The voyage of the Grace of Bristol of M. Rice ^ones, a Barke of 

 thirty-five Tunnes, vp into the Bay of Saint Laurence to the Northwest of Newefoundland, as 

 farre as the Isle of Assumption or Natiscotec, for the barbes or fynnes of Whales and traine oyle, 

 made by Silvester Wyet, Shipmaster of Bristoll. 



1 The Voyage of Sir Robert Dudley to the West Indies, 1594-1595. Hakluyt Soc., 1899, p. 53. 



