194 



HISTORY AND METHODS OF THE FISHERIES. 



places were constantly being sought for. About 1719 Dutch whaling vessels first entered Davis 

 Strait and established a fishery that continues to this day to employ fleets of Scotch and Amer- 

 ican whalers ; the latter began whaling in this strait about the year 1737. 



Scoresby,* in his account of the Arctic regions, gives a history of the northern whale fishery 

 from its commencement till 1820, and accurately describes the methods employed in the capture of 

 whales. He also gives valuable statistics of the Spitzbergen, Greenland, and Davis Strait fisheries, 

 in which he shows that the Dutch sent 17,331 ships to the northern fisheries between 1669 and 

 1778 and captured 64,576 whales. The following statement shows these facts by decades : 



Dutch whale fishery, 1669 to 1769. 



* Greenland included Spitzbergen and east coast of Greenland. 



" This fishery, when in its most flourishing condition, was principally carried on in the seas and 

 bays round Spitzbergen, and there the Hollanders constructed the village of Smeerenberg, where 

 they boiled the blubber and prepared the oil and whalebone. The havoc made among the whales, 

 and their dispersion to the coasts of Greenland and Davis Strait, put an end to the establishment, 

 and with it to the golden age of the whale fishery. In 1842 there was only one vessel engaged in 

 this once flourishing fishery ; in 1853 there were five, and in 1854 there were three." t 



" The history of the Spitzbergen country," says Nordenskiold, "has not yet been written in a 

 satisfactory way, and is in many respects very obscure. It is supposed that after the discovery of 

 Spitzbergen in 1596 by Barents, the hunting in the polar seas began during Bennet's first voyage in 

 1603, and that the whale fishing was introduced by Joanu Poole in 1610. But already in the fol- 

 lowing year Poole, whose vessel was then wrecked on the west coast of Spitzbergen. found in Horn 

 Sound a ship from Hull, to which he gave charge of saving his cargo, and two years after the 

 English were compelled, in order to keep foreigners from the fishing field they wished to monopolize, 

 to send out six men-of-war, which found there eight Spanish and a number of Dutch and French 

 vessels (-Purchas, iii, pp. 462, 716, &c.). Even in pur days the accounts of new sources of wealth do 

 not spread so rapidly as in this case, unless, along with the history of the discovery which was written 

 by Hakluyt, Purchas, De Veer, &c., there had been an unknown history of discovery, and the 

 whale fishing, of which it may still be possible to collect some particulars from the archives of San 

 Sebastian, Dunkirk, Hull, and other ports. 



* Account of the Arctic Regions, &c., London, 1820, 2 vols. 

 tEncy. Britannica, vol. xi, 583. 



