66 THE WHALE HUNTERS 



whales were lovers of the ice fringe and that the Pilgrim 

 was still not yet in those higher latitudes where they could 

 be expected to be found in plenty. 



The boy looked down at the dead whale as it wallowed 

 under the ship's side. It was dark in colour and not 

 unlike the black right whales he had seen on the shores of 

 the island ; but it had a white patch on its chin and on its 

 head that peculiar bump that he had noticed when it was 

 swimming; another difference was that it did not have on 

 its snout the barnacle-clustered 'bonnet' that the black 

 right whales had. He recalled how Mr. Mather had 

 told him that it was the thick blubber of the Greenland 

 whale and its high yield of oil that had attracted the big 

 Dutch, German and English whaleships to the inhospit- 

 able Arctic waters. The other reason they had gone 

 there, he had said, was that ever since the days of the 

 Basque whalers in the twelfth century the right whales 

 which once swam in great numbers around the European 

 coasts had been hunted until there were none left and the 

 whaleships had had to seek fresh ground in more distant 

 waters. 



Jonathan had also learnt that the same process was 

 taking shape along the New England shores as the right 

 whales there grew less and less plentiful. The sperm 

 whale which was a much more formidable opponent than 

 either of the right whales was already being pursued in 

 the warmer southern seas and throughout the next 

 hundred years it was to provide the New England whale- 

 men and the Nantucketers in particular with a seemingly 

 endless source of oil. 



The task of stripping the blubber from the whale in mid- 

 ocean was a long and arduous one, for the Pilgrim was 

 barely twice the weight of this immature Greenland 

 whale and even had her men known of the more efficient 

 method of hanging a cutting tackle in the rigging they 

 could not have used it in so small a ship. 



