In the old days only three species, the sperm, bowhead and right whale, were hunted and until Svend Foyn invented the harpoon-gun the fin whales, of less commercial value, were seldom captured. Their yield of oil was so small, and the whalebone so short and coarse, that if these products alone were utilized they were not worth the trouble of killing. Moreover, the great speed of the animals in the water and their tendency to sink when dead made them unacceptable to the men who hunted in a small boat with a hand harpoon and lance.
With the development of steam whalers the situation was changed, for they made possible the capture of “finners” in sufficient numbers to warrant the erection of stations at certain points on the shore, near the feeding grounds of the animals, where the huge carcasses could be brought in and converted into commercial products.
The perfection of the harpoon-gun and steam whale ships came only after long discouragement and persistent effort upon the part of Svend Foyn. Foyn was born in Tønsberg in 1809, and died there in 1894. He went to sea at fourteen in the merchant service and later entered the sealing fleet where he eventually made considerable money. It was while sealing that he conceived the idea of capturing the fin whales with a bomb harpoon, and 360,000 kronen were spent in experimenting before he succeeded in building a suitable gun and vessel.
In 1864 he went to Finmark for the first time in the small ship Spes et Fides, but caught nothing and was equally unsuccessful in the two following years. In 1867 he secured the first whales at Vardö, in Varangerfjord, and the next season killed 30. In 1869 he went north with two ships but got only 17 whales, and in 1870 only 36. It was in this year that at Kirkeö the first factory for converting whale flesh into guano, or fertilizer, was built and successfully operated. Foyn’s best years were between 1871 and 1880, when 506 whales were killed, having a value of about 2,000,000 kronen.
In 1877 a competitive company began work in Jarfjord, and in 1881 two others started at Vardö and two in West Finmark near the North Cape. In 1882 Norway had 8 companies and 12 ships, and five years later 20 companies and 35 ships. In 1890 the whales began to show the effect of continual persecution, decreasing rapidly in numbers, and five companies shifted their operations to Iceland. In 1896 the 18 ships hunting there killed 792 whales, yielding 49,500 barrels of oil; in the same season 29 ships off the Finmark coast caught 1,212 whales.
From the very beginning the Norwegian fishermen were hostile to the shore whalers, for they believed that the whales drove the fish toward the land and into their nets and that their industry was being greatly injured by the slaughter of the animals. Although it has been clearly demonstrated that whales have no direct influence upon the movements of fish, nevertheless in 1903 the Störthing prohibited shore whaling altogether.
The efforts of the Norwegian whalers had been watched with interest in other parts of the world and in 1897 shore whaling began in Newfoundland; there it thrived amazingly, and by 1905 eighteen stations were in operation upon the island and in its immediate vicinity.
In 1905 the first shore station on the Pacific coast of America was built at Sechart, in Barclay Sound, on the west side of Vancouver Island. This factory was under the management of the Pacific Whaling Company, of Victoria, B. C., and although their first season was not a success, a revision of the methods of handling the carcasses resulted in a lucrative business being established. In 1907 a second fine station was erected at Kyuquot, one hundred miles north of Sechart.
About this time the Tyee Company was formed under the direction of Captains Hibberd and Barneson, and a station was constructed at Murderer’s Cove, on the southern end of Admiralty Island, Alaska. The hunting here was entirely conducted in the inland waters of Frederick Sound, and after a few seasons the whales became so reduced in numbers that operations had to be transferred to the open sea about Cape Ommaney, sixty miles away; the Tyee Company was later re-formed as the United States Whaling Company.
In 1910 the Pacific Whaling Company was sold to the Canadian North Pacific Fisheries, Ltd., with stations at Rose and Naden Harbor, Queen Charlotte Islands, and Bay City, Washington, besides the two Vancouver factories. Another establishment, known as the Alaska Whaling Company, started work at Unimak Pass, Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and a Norwegian firm built a station on the Pacific coast of Mexico.