JAMES COOK 87 
of London were on the alert for new fields of commer- 
cial adventure, and the description of the vast abundance 
of seals in Cook’s report on the Isle of Georgia fell on 
attentive ears. It is difficult for us to realise the vast 
importance of animal oil at the end of the eighteenth 
century. As a lubricant for machinery, the use of which 
was steadily extending in every branch of industry, it 
was important; but for the purposes of illumination it 
was indispensible. Electric light was only known as 
the spark from a frictional electric machine ; coal-gas was 
occasionally produced as a laboratory experiment, but 
Lord Dundonald’s attempt in 1787 to use it for illumina- 
tion was laughed at as the fad of a mad sailor ; mineral 
oil was only used in China and some scarcely known 
parts of Central Asia ; wax candles lighted the houses of 
the rich alone; the poor had to be content with tallow 
dips. The lighting of towns was becoming general 
and whale oil or seal oil was the only form of 
fuel that was thought fit for the purpose. The whalers 
of the North were then in the zenith of their glory, and 
great fleets sailed each year for the Greenland seas and 
came back laden with catches which now seem almost 
fabulous. The hunters of the sperm whale had begun 
their long voyages in the tropical oceans, the wildest and 
most adventurous form of all seafaring, but still the de- 
mand increased, far exceeding the supply, and a new 
oil-field where the whale or blubber-seal could be met 
with was in the quieter commercial life of the last quarter 
of the eighteenth century, as great a discovery in its own 
way, as a new petroleum field was in the last quarter of 
the nineteenth. 
As early as the year 1778 the English sealers brought 
back from the Isle of Georgia and Magellan Strait as 
