Abstract
IN 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 century 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. Zorgdräger, 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 extermination of the most valuable and most interesting species, and in the scantiness of the material 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 now-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 yield us “several tons” of whale-bone!
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T., D. The New Whale Fisheries 1 . Nature 71, 84–85 (1904). https://doi.org/10.1038/071084a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/071084a0