III.

Early History

Early written records suggest that organized, commercial whaling may have begun in the 900s in western Europe. By the 1100s, whaling for the North Atlantic right whale in the Bay of Biscay was one of the principal industries of the predominantly Basque provinces of Spain and France. This whale species was known as the right whale because whalers considered it the “right” whale to catch. The right whale was slow-swimming, rich in blubber and baleen, and it floated when dead, making it easy to recover. Although annual catches were never large, they were sufficient to deplete the small number of right whales in the Bay of Biscay. This led the Basques to other North Atlantic waters, including those off Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, and the island chain of Spitsbergen (present-day Svalbard). The Basques had certainly reached Newfoundland by 1550, and there is evidence to suggest they may have been there much earlier. The bowhead whale, a type of right whale similar to the North Atlantic or Northern right whale but with a more northerly distribution, became the mainstay of the industry in the North Atlantic by the late 1600s.

Spitsbergen, known previously to the Norwegians and rediscovered in 1596 by the Dutch navigator Willem Barents, became the center of English and Dutch whaling during the 1600s. The English may have been led there by the Basques because many English vessels had Basque crews. When whales became scarce off Spitsbergen around 1710, the industry shifted to Greenland and the Davis Strait. The latter grounds were also nearly depleted by the 1800s. By the beginning of the 1700s, European whaling was beginning to decline, and American or “Yankee” whaling was in the ascendancy. Whaling for right and bowhead whales was relatively wasteful, the main products being blubber and baleen. The meat and other organs were not used.

In the North Pacific, Japanese harpoon whaling began in the 1570s. Whaling with nets became organized around 1675, taking a variety of species including sperm, fin, humpback, gray, and North Pacific right whales. The Japanese wasted no part of the whale.