OCEANIC MAMMALS 509 



After 1840 the diminishing number of whales caused a gradual 

 falling off in the industry, but a few whalers continued to sail 

 annually from Dundee and Peterhead. "From 1887 there 

 were not more than 10 ships in any year, and with this number 

 the catch generally averaged less than 2 whales a ship. The 

 largest total after 1887 was 29, obtained in 1893 by 5 ships. 

 In 1910, 18 whales were caught by 10 ships; and in 1911 only 

 7 by 8 ships. The discouraging results of that year are indi- 

 cated by the fact that only 1 ship left Dundee in 1912 and 

 1913, and that the total catch in each of those years is returned 

 as 0" (Harmer, 1928). 



With the practical extermination of the Davis Strait popu- 

 lation, attention was next directed to the Bering Sea stock. 

 "In 1848 Captain Roys was the first whaler to pass through 

 Bering Strait to the Arctic Ocean, where he found whales in- 

 numerable, some of which yielded two hundred and eighty 

 barrels of oil" (Harmer, 1928). Most of the whaling here was 

 carried on by American whalemen, in increasing numbers. 

 "The first whaling ship to venture east of Point Barrow to 

 Herschel island was the Newport in 1888. It returned west 

 without wintering. The Newport and other ships lured by the 

 new whaling ground came to winter in 1889, and by 1893 one- 

 fourth of the vessels whaling in the North Pacific and Arctic 

 spent the winter around the mouth of the Mackenzie River. 

 In 1894-1895 fifteen vessels, with about 800 men, wintered at 

 Herschel Island, Yukon Territory. Ships occasionally spent 

 the winter at Cape Bathurst and on two occasions as far east as 

 Langton Bay. As the ice in this part of the Arctic presses in 

 close to the land and is never far away, the whaling season 

 varied from six weeks to a maximum of three months for ships 

 which wintered. During the latter years of the whaling busi- 

 ness in the Western Arctic, whales were hunted chiefly for the 

 baleen or 'whalebone,' and the oil and other products were 

 largely disregarded. This was inherently an extravagant and 

 wasteful exploitation of one of the few natural resources of the 

 region, but with whalebone selling at $4 or $5 per pound, high 

 profits might be made, in spite of lean years and casualties. 

 Catches of 64, 67, and 69 whales per ship in a two-year voyage 

 were recorded. The season of 1893 was the high year of the 

 Western Arctic whaling fleet, with 309 whales taken . . . 

 The whaling industry in the Western Arctic lasted only about 



