THE OLD OAKEN CHEST l6l 



Thomas owned lay rotting at their moorings. Nantucket 

 had weathered many storms but this time Thomas knew 

 that its days of prosperity were ended. But sperm 

 whahng was the only business that Thomas and his only 

 son Edward knew, so they refitted one of their whaleships 

 and sold up the rest together with the house and shipyard 

 that Jonathan had founded, then with Mrs. Oakley and 

 the three daughters they sailed to Britain where the sperm 

 whale industry was still thriving. They settled in Dundee 

 where sperm oil was wanted for the jute industry and 

 once more Thomas and his son sailed to the Pacific after 

 the cachalots. These were not so easy to find after being 

 hunted so intensely for a century but the Oakleys brought 

 back enough oil to show good profits. 



'Then Jane, Thomas's second daughter, met a man 

 from our own country. His name was Erik Olafsen and 

 he was mate of a Norwegian whaler visiting Dundee. 

 Jane married him and sailed with him across the North 

 Sea to his home in Norway. Here great new changes 

 were taking place in the old industry of whaling. 



'The firing of a harpoon from a gun which so many men 

 had attempted through the centuries had at last been 

 perfected in 1872 by a man named Svend Foyn; and what 

 is more, the barbed harpoon head had been fitted with a 

 charge that exploded on entering the whale and so killed 

 it more quickly. Foyn had mounted his guns in the bows 

 of schooners propelled by the new-fangled steam engine 

 and had made it possible at last to kill the bigger species 

 of the rorquals, the blue and the fin whales, which had 

 always been too fast a target for the hand harpoon 

 thrown from a rowing boat. It was their speed which had 

 saved them from being killed oflf like the right whales. 



'The rorquals, which you can tell by the fluting on 

 their throats and the fin on their backs, are members of the 

 baleen family but are more streamlined than the right 

 whales ; and the blue and fin whales are the largest of all 



