CHAPTER XI
FISHING AND OTHER MARINE INDUSTRIES
The grandest sea-chase is that after the whale—the most gigantic of mammals, the most extraordinary in appearance and habits, and the most valuable to man, for the capture of one may mean ten times as much reward as the ivory of an elephant or the rarest otter-skin would afford, and perhaps a hundred times as much, if ambergris be found within its body.
Men have had the hardihood to chase these huge and often savage creatures in their own turbulent element, and with the most primitive weapons, ever since the art of navigation was acquired.
The Japanese and other Asiatics of the western shore of the North Pacific have dared to go out in rowboats and attack the largest whales since the origin of their traditions, and they had a method of entangling these leviathans in nets, which must have produced exciting scenes, as the monster struggled amid the bloody turmoil of waters to free himself from the innumerable connected cords that embarrassed his movements, rather than subdued his strength, until his life ebbed away through a hundred wounds.
AN OLD WHALER.
On the Alaskan coast, and southward as far as Oregon, the Indians, and especially those of the Queen Charlotte Islands and the coasts of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, were accustomed, hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago, to go far away into the ocean in their dug-out canoes, searching for and spearing the whales with lances made of flint or bone, having detachable barbed heads. These were attached to shafts by rawhide lines, and to the shafts were attached buoys of large inflated bladders. When the animal was struck, the heavy pole would drive the lancehead through the skin and then fall off. The barbs would not only hold the instrument there, but cause it to work deeper and deeper, and the whale, darting away or diving, would be so impeded by dragging the poles and buoys after him, that he would soon return to receive other darts, and so, between loss of blood and exhaustion, would ultimately be killed. It is extremely interesting to read the stories, gathered by early travelers from the lips of the Indians,—old Haidas or Makahs are living yet who have taken part in such nerve-testing canoe-chases,—of their fights with this gigantic foe far from land, and their hair’s-breadth escapes; and it is not strange that many quaint ceremonies were devised to placate the waters and the power of the whale-god in advance, and to honor the sea-hunters when they returned.
The Greenlanders and Eastern Eskimos do not seem to have been able in their small skin boats to conquer the largest sort of whales, but the smaller ones, such as the white whale, fell to their spears in a similar way; and they took great pains to secure any dead or stranded cetacean that came within their reach, the bones of which were as valuable to them, in the absence of wood, as were the flesh, oil, and sinews.
The history of European whaling begins with the excursions of the Basques, who, as long ago at least as the tenth century, were accustomed to go out from their shore-towns in search of the southern right whale which frequents the Bay of Biscay and its offing. Doubtless their boats were small, half-decked, lugger-rigged “shyppes,” carrying ten to fifteen men, and looking much like many of the Channel fishermen of to-day. This “fishery” supplied all Europe during the Middle Ages with the whalebone and oil which were among the luxuries of the rich at that time; but by the time the sixteenth century had arrived, whales had become so scarce in the Eastern Atlantic—where now they are almost extinct—that this industry must have ceased had not the Cabots shown the way to Newfoundland, to whose shores the Basques at once extended their voyages with excellent results, for in those days whales were commonly seen all along the American shore of the North Atlantic. But this remote fishery would have been too precarious and costly to be of great consequence had it not been for the early efforts, related in Chapter V, to find a passage to the East north of the continents. The earliest of these failed, but they brought back reports that the edge of the frozen sea abounded in whales, and men rushed into this newly discovered field of wealth, as, centuries later, they abandoned everything in headlong haste to go to the gold-fields of California, Australia, South Africa or the Yukon Valley.