Chapter 2 - Lost Hopes and Expensive Failures, c. 1670-1750

Summary

For almost a century English whaling was a dismal affair conducted on a level akin to an Englishman with a thimble emptying the same tun as a Dutchman with a bucket: the latter's good fortune was the former's despair. Nothing, it seemed, could generate the kind of success enjoyed in the Netherlands or guarantee the profits required to revive the trade. The most notable thing, perhaps, was the want of English interest in the Arctic during the Commercial Revolution of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as merchants turned their attention to the East and West Indies and to North America, where more profitable outlets for investment were found. Most of the raw materials required in England could be obtained from Europe or America, and whale oil was, after all, only one of many such materials. It could be obtained so easily and so cheaply that there was little incentive for Englishmen to trouble themselves with re-learning the Arctic trade when there were so many other things to divert them.

The root of the withered trade was fixed firmly in an arid domestic market, and no amount of pruning or grafting could produce decent fruit. Occasionally the Muscovy Company and its rivals had brought home over 2000 tuns of oil; almost invariably they regretted their good fortune and complained of having oil on their hands. In good years the price obtained in London was lower than that in Amsterdam; in bad years Dutch-caught oil flooded in at a price to ruin the English adventurers. If import figures are anything to go by, the demand in Britain in the early eighteenth century was actually lower than it had been in the early seventeenth century. Only three times in the first quarter of the century did imports exceed 2000 tuns, and on six occasions they were less than 1000 tuns (see table 1).

This blatantly discouraging background explains in large measure why the British neglected to follow the Dutch from the Spitsbergen to the Greenland fishery, and so lost the advantages to be gained from early experimental voyages in what was, in effect, a novel Arctic experience. Undoubtedly Greenland had disadvantages compared with Spitsbergen, not least of which was the greater cost of stouter ships and additional stores, but these were soon outweighed by the advantages.