CHAPTER II 



IN August I went to Tonsberg, the capital of the old 

 Viking days, and over the wooden housetops saw the 

 two bare pole masts of our ship and a little later 

 saw her entire hull ! How infinitely satisfactory, to see 

 our dream of a year ago in Balta Sound realised in hard iron 

 and pine on the slip. She is one hundred and ten feet over all, 

 with twenty-two-foot beam just a few feet longer than 

 the Viking ship of the Norwegian princes that was found a 

 year or two ago buried within a mile and a half of where our 

 vessel is being built. Tonsberg was the Viking centre, now 

 it is the centre of the modern whaling industry of the world. 



Years ago we thought of whaling as connected with the 

 hunting of whales in the Arctic regions, or of cachalot or 

 sperm whaling in subtropical seas, carried on by sailing- 

 vessels which had several small boats and large crews : in 

 the eighteenth century 35,000 men and 700 vessels hunted 

 the Greenland Right whale. 



This modern whaling, however, that I write about just 

 now is a new kind of whaling of only forty-eight years' 

 growth. It has grown up as the old styles went more or 

 less out of practice. 



Two or three New Bedford sailing-ships still prosecute the 

 old style of sperm whaling south of the line, but the Green- 

 land Right whale hunting has been almost entirely given up 

 within the last two years. The Dundee whalers gave it up 

 in 1912, because this new whaling brought down the price 

 of whale oil, and because the Right whale or whalebone 

 whale, Balsena Mysticetus, had become scarce and so wary 

 that it could not be killed in sufficient numbers to pay 

 expenses. 



This Balaena or whalebone whale has no fin on its back. 



A large Right whale, or Bowhead, as it is sometimes called, 

 has nearly a ton of whalebone in its mouth, which a few years 

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