64 A HISTORY OF THE WHALE FISHERIES 



due to a captain of Cibourre named Francois 

 Sopite. 



The whalebone is used for ladies' stays and 

 knife handles, the skeletons to make enclosures for 

 gardens, the vertebrae as chairs and seats in houses. 



In the seventeenth century and possibly even in 

 the sixteenth, this Basque fishery had declined. 

 Probably the whales were getting more shy and 

 difficult to capture as the result of persistent fishing. 

 Clayrac records them as passing Biarritz regularly 

 towards the end of the seventeenth century (1671). 



The Basques fished for whales before the 

 invention or use of the mariner's compass. Never- 

 theless, they fished in the open sea to the west and 

 are said to have attained in 1372 the banks of 

 Newfoundland, where they encountered whales in 

 abundance. This whale they called the Sarda, to 

 distinguish it from the species commonly found in 

 the Bay of Biscay. The word Sarda in the Basque 

 language signifies a whale that keeps together in 

 schools. 



Continuing their voyages the Basques reached the 

 Gulf of St Lawrence, where they discovered another 

 different species of whale which they called the 

 <: Grand Bay Whale," a name used by Thomas 

 Edge in his classification of Spitsbergen whales. 



When the Gulf of St Lawrence became 

 impoverished, the Basque whalers pushed on to the 

 edge of the ice off Greenland, where they captured 

 the Greenland Whale which appeared to them to 

 be the same as that of the Gulf of St Lawrence. 



