Preface

Summary

It is doubtful if any trade, save that in human beings, has attracted so much attention as whaling. There is a huge bibliography, which in 1948 filled ninetyfive pages of the Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History. From its major advance in the 1780s, and especially during the last century, whaling - described by one of its earliest participants as “the greatest chase which nature yieldeth” - appealed to a readership searching for tales of exploration, adventure and hazard in romantic, far-off places. In the present century interest has to some extent shifted, and scientists working for or against the trade have produced a vast number of monographs on whales and various aspects of whaling. A number of books have combined a zoology of the whale with a brief outline of the trade, either to instruct a popular audience or to secure its condemnation of the ruthlessness of modern whaling. So far there has been no modern history of the whole of Britain's three hundred and fifty year involvement - sometimes extensive and sometimes slight - in whaling. In endeavouring to fill this gap, I have tried to steer a course between intricate science and exaggerated adventure. While recognising the appeal - and importance - of the human side of whaling, I have avoided lengthy accounts of the daring, bravery and suffering that appear in so many original and secondary sources. Nor have I dwelt on the bloody side of whaling. D'Arcy Thompson, the distinguished naturalist and member of the Scottish Fishery Board, once remarked that “the whale, for all its great size, has no voice with which to cry out when it is harpooned and lacerated by the whalermen, and no man can tell what suffering the poor creatures silently endure as they die of their wounds.” There is no evidence that whalermen were ever impressed by the whale's silence, but they were commonly awestruck by the incongruity of their activities, and many men, to slave their conscience or enhance their prowess, told of the sufferings of the whale. That the Leviathan, with such bounding energy, could be overcome by puny men was more likely to be thought of as an Act of God rewarding sabbath observance than as capital in the pursuit of profit; and its heroic struggles have entered classical literature in Herman Melville's Moby Dick.