84 



NA TURE 



[NOVKMUKR 24, 1904 



THE NEW WHALE FISHERIES.^ 



IX the story of the rise and fall of the whale fisheries 

 history has many times repeated herself. The 

 Basque fishery, the oldest of all, the fragmentary 

 records of which go back beyond the middle ages, 

 which extended centuries ago to the other side of the 

 Atlantic, which long furnished harpooners to our own 

 fleet, and which has left us the harpoon and its name, 

 finally passed away during last century with a 

 practical extinction of the object of its pursuit. Our 

 own Greenland, or right whale, fishery, in which for 

 one hundred years some 250 vessels were employed, 

 hailing from almost every east coast port, has been 

 now for nearly another centun,- on the decline, and 

 some half dozen whalers from Dundee are all that is 

 left of the once great argosy. A few fine old American 

 ships, with dark-skinned harpooneers from the Cape 

 Verdes, still chase the sperm whale throughout its 

 world-wide habitat, in place of the 700 sail that 

 followed the business sixty years ago. Zorgdrager, 

 Scoresby, Scammon, and a host of lesser men have left 

 us records of these old fisheries, 

 of the methods employed, and of 

 the marvellous success achieved ; 

 but, nevertheless, the naturalist 

 has much to regret in the passing 

 away of these great industries, in 

 the near approach to extermin- 

 ation of the most valuable and 

 most interesting species, and in the 

 scantiness of the materia! that has 

 as yet been saved. Our chief 

 museum contains, I believe, 

 neither skeleton nor even skull of 

 the Greenland whale, and the 

 difficulties in the way of procuring 

 one novv-a-days seem to be very 

 great indeed. We have to go to 

 Stockholm or St. Petersburg to 

 see the entire skeleton of such a 

 whale, with the huge fringes of 

 whale-bone still in place in the 

 jaws. Nor, by the way, would 

 our knowledge seem to be more 

 adequate than our anatomical 

 material, for a writer in a standard 

 text-book told us only the other 

 day that a single whale may vield 

 us " several tons " of whale-bone! 



While the fisheries before ^"^' 



mentioned, and others like to 



them, are passing or have passed away, a new fishery 

 has sprung up that has for the object of its pursuit 

 a class of whales that formerly had been left in 

 peace. This is the fishery for the great rorquals, or 

 finner whales, first instituted by Captain Svend Foyn 

 at Vadso in 1864. The fishery is carried on by means 

 of small steamers, carrying at their bows a harpoon 

 gun which discharges a line and explosive bullet. The 

 steamer tows the fish home, to be flensed and worked 

 up in the factory ashore. Twenty years after Svend 

 Foyn's small beginning there were more than thirtv 

 such factories on the coasts of Finmark, but all of these 

 have very recently been disestablished by the Nor- 

 wegian Government, which, in deference to temporary 

 and local prejudice, is robbing its country of a profit- 

 able and ill-spared industry. The great success and 

 profit of this fishery has led to its extension to Iceland, 

 Faeroe, Newfoundland, and lastly, to Shetland and the 

 Hebrides ; but it is still almost wholly in Norwegian 



1 "The Whalebone Whales of the Western North .^tlantJc.' By 

 Frederick W. True. (Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge.) Pp. iv+ 

 ^^2, and plates. (Washington : Smithsonian Institution, 1904.) 



NO. 1830, VOL. 71] 



hands, and a factory at Tonsberg enjoys a practical 

 monopoly of the machinery employed. 



One consequence of the growth of this new industry 

 has been to impress upon us, or to remind us of, the 

 fact that at least certain species of whales exist in 

 their native seas in prodigious numbers, seldom though 

 the occasional traveller has the luck to see them. 

 Once, in the North Pacific, on a calm summer's day, 

 I saw for an hour the ship surrounded on every side 

 by great whales to the number of many hundreds, 

 and a somewhat similar display is said to have been 

 witnessed to the north of Shetland during the past 

 sunniier. Dr. Hjort calculates that from the be- 

 ginning until igoi the finner whale fishery resulted 

 in the capture of some 27,000 fish, a vast number in 

 itself, though not great in comparison to the yield of 

 the Arctic fishery in its palmy days, for the Dutch 

 alone are reckoned to have taken no less than about 

 575,900 Greenland whales and " Nordkapers " or 

 Biscayan whales, between 1669 and 1778. Probably 

 long lived, but certainly slow breeding, the whale 

 must in the end give wnv before a wholesale persecu- 



— The Common Rorqual, Snouks Arm, Newfoundland. 



tion ; but meanwhile several species are still immensely 

 numerous, and the naturalist has at least the con- 

 solation that pursuit tends to cease as scarcity becomes 

 manifest, and long before actual extermination is 

 achieved. 



The new industry has many attractions and oppor- 

 tunities for the naturalist. The stations are in many 

 cases within reach of easy travel, and the manner in 

 which the carcases are drawn up for flensing on the 

 shore affords a perfect spectacle of the entire creature. 

 The volume which has suggested the present article, 

 by Dr. F. W. True, of thet'.S. National Museum, is 

 the outcome of a careful use of the opportunities 

 afforded by the Newfoundland whaling stations, sup- 

 plemented by abundant use of literature and study in 

 -American museums. Dr. True, who is already well 

 known as a student of the Cetacea, seems to have 

 made it his first object to investigate the specific 

 characters of the larger whales, with the exception 

 of the Greenland whale, and to determine, once for 

 all, whether specimens of the various forms from the 

 two sides of the Atlantic be specifically identical. 



