Page:Natural History (1848).djvu/129

Rh in the seas to which it still resorts. Nothing can be more impolitic than the slaughter of young animals, in themselves nearly useless, as thus the source of future supply is dried up. ‘The Whale produces but one at a birth, which is suckled a long time, until by the development of its plates of baleen, it is able to feed itself on its ocean-supplies.

The whale fishery was carried on as early as the twelfth century, by the inhabitants of Biscay. It does not appear, however, that they sought their huge prey in any more distant locality than the Bay which bears the same name, whence the Whale has long disappeared. The revival of this lucrative pursuit in the more productive regions that he beneath the Arctic Circle, was owing to the discoveries of those enterprising navigators who sought a north-west passage to the Pacific, about the close of the sixteenth century. Their reports of the great abundance of Whales about the coasts of Greenland and Spitzbergen, awakened the spirit of commercial enterprize in the English and Dutch, who embarked with vigour and success in the new pursuit, and were soon followed by the French, Danes, and Hamburgers, So great was the number of Whales in those seas, and so easy was their capture, that many vessels used to be sent to the shores of Spitzbergen in ballast, which were not engaged in the actual pursuit, but were simply destined to bring home the superabundance of oil and whalebone obtained by the whalers, over and above what their own vessels could carry. The practice then was to boil the blubber into oil upon the shore. The ardour of pursuit, however,