Prefc 



ace 



I CANNOT REMEMBER whcn the idea for this book first 

 started. Perhaps the seed was sown when, as a boy, I 

 listened to the salty tales of my now long-departed sea- 

 faring uncles, or browsed in wonder over their old prints 

 of sailors, ships and seaports in far-off lands, or in my day- 

 dreams saw the bone ship model in the glass case on my 

 grandfather's bureau come to life and fly with full- 

 bosomed sail over a rolling blue ocean. 



It was years later, when I was a student at an art school, 

 that the seed of the idea germinated. It first peeped 

 through the sparse soil of my imagination in the form of a 

 classroom exercise when each of us was asked to produce a 

 specimen picture book on a subject of our own choice. I 

 chose whaling, a subject which had always seemed to me 

 the most fascinating of sea-lore ; and it was then that I 

 realised that, colourful though they might be, my boyish 

 mental pictures were very blurred in their outlines and 

 would have to be clarified and sharpened with the aid of 

 research. 



From then on, the book, like Topsy, just growed. The 

 captions to the pictures developed into tales and the 

 whalemen, the whaleships and even the whales began to 

 take on character. The pictures themselves began to 

 flow in black ink and crystallise on white paper. 



Eventually the book resolved itself into three parts, each 

 set in a different period during the past three-hundred- 

 odd years. It tells of some of the adventures of widely 

 separated generations of a family of whalemen. It tells 

 too something of an even greater adventure story — the 

 story of whaling. 



The massive whale factory ship of modern times, fed 

 with whales by her fleet of fast catchers equipped with 

 lethal harpoon guns, is a far cry from those early times 



