348 Mr Lillie, Notes on the Larger Getacea. 



among the northern icefields. The English and Dutch immediately 

 opened up the Arctic whale fishery, taking with them the hardy 

 Basque seamen to act as their instructors. This fishery reached 

 its height at the beginning of the 18th century, English, Dutch, 

 Germans, Spaniards and Danes all taking part. In 1749 the first 

 vessels set out from Scotland and took over the fishing in Davis 

 Strait, while the Americans worked that of the Behring Strait, 

 the fishery on the east coast of Greenland being then exhausted. 

 The last great names associated with the Greenland fisheries are 

 those of Scoresby and David Gray in the Atlantic and Scammon 

 in the Pacific. The fishery is now almost extinct. 



In 1712 the Sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) was first 

 hunted. This fishery was started by Americans on the island of 

 Nantucket in the Atlantic. British ships took part in 1775 and 

 extended the fishery to the Pacific and Indian oceans, but they 

 abandoned it in 1853. This whale is now chiefly hunted by 

 Americans and Norwegians. 



The shore-loving Californian Gray whale {Rhachianectes glaucus) 

 was first pursued on the Pacific coast of North America in 1846. 



In 1866 a new era began in the whaling industry. Up to this 

 date attention had necessarily been confined to the two species of 

 Balaena, the Sperm whale and the Californian Gray whale. All 

 these slow-moving creatures could be hunted with the hand 

 harpoon in small boats each manned by six men, which put 

 out from the shore or from a whale ship in mid-ocean as soon 

 as a whale was sighted. 



The fast-swimming Balaenopteridae or Rorquals remained 

 unmolested by man until 1866, when Captain Svend Foyn, a 

 Norwegian seaman, invented a harpoon which made their capture 

 possible. This deadly projectile is fitted with an explosive shell 

 and is fired, together with the attached harpoon-rope, from a gun 

 in the bow of the whaling steamer. Captain Foyn took out a 

 patent for his invention, established a station at Vadso and opened 

 up the Rorqual whale fishery off the coast of Finmarken. 



In 1882 his patent expired and numerous stations sprang into 

 existence along the northern coasts of Norway and Lapland, after- 

 wards spreading to Iceland and the Faroe Islands. 



In 1903 this industry reached the shores of Scotland. There 

 are now four stations on the mainland of Shetland and one in 

 North Harris in the Hebrides. In 1908 a station was established 

 on the Island of South Innishkea off the coast of Co. Mayo in the 

 west of Ireland and a second Irish station is expected to open next 

 summer. All the stations on the east side of the Atlantic are in 

 the hands of Norwegians who, like the old Basque whalers before 

 them, are the masters of the industry they invented and have 

 been engaged by other nations to teach them their craft. The 



